Iraq immigration swells Swedish population

From the Swedish news­pa­per “The Local”

Sweden’s pop­u­la­tion has grown con­sid­er­ably so far this year. Immi­gra­tion is the main source of the growth, with Iraq one of the main sources of immigrants.

So far, the pop­u­la­tion has increased by 55,799 peo­ple, the largest rise since 1994, tak­ing Swe­den com­fort­ably clear of the nine mil­lion mark at 9,103,551.

Between Jan­u­ary and Sep­tem­ber, 73,907 peo­ple moved to Swe­den from abroad. This is 26,000 more, or 54 per­cent, than dur­ing the same period last year. Accord­ing to a report by Sta­tis­tics Swe­den, the increase is mainly made up of Swedish cit­i­zens who have returned home. The num­ber of for­eign­ers, espe­cially from Iraq, has also increased sig­nif­i­cantly.

Dur­ing the first three quar­ters of the year, 7,094 Iraqis have come to Swe­den. Last year, the num­ber of Iraqis that came to Swe­den was 1,532. Another nation­al­ity quickly increas­ing in num­bers in Swe­den is Polish.

But immi­gra­tion is not the only cause of Sweden’s pop­u­la­tion increase. Some 81,948 babies were born dur­ing the first three quar­ters of the year – a five per­cent increase com­pared to last year. Again, the last time this many babies were born in Swe­den was in 1994. The total num­ber of births exceeded the num­ber of deaths by 14,095.

Mar­riage has also increased in pop­u­lar­ity with the num­ber of peo­ple tying the knot higher than at any time since 1989. Some 37,529 mar­riages took place dur­ing the first nine months of the year. Divorces have increased in num­ber: 14, 826 cou­ples got divorced this year com­pared to 14,727 divorces last year.