Remigration part I: “It Doesn’t Feel Right in My Heart”

This is the first essay in a new series on remigration. The previous series on Orania explored what happens when a people decides to build something of their own. This series will explore what happens when a country tries to undo what has already been done.

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Sweden’s migration minister recently said that something “doesn’t feel right in my heart.”

He was talking about the deportation of minors who have turned eighteen. Teenagers who speak Swedish, attend Swedish schools, have Swedish friends, live Swedish lives. Swedish in every sense except blood.

A few years ago, the Swedish right would have dismissed that kind of language. They would have called it naive, emotional, the soft sentimentality of people who don’t understand that politics requires hard decisions. Now they're using it themselves, and with an election approaching, the deportations have little public support — 77 percent oppose them in a recent poll.

Our moderate right government halted these deportations with the support from the Sweden Democrats, who built their political identity on a concept called “Bevara Sverige Svenskt” — Keep Sweden Swedish. They would never use that slogan today, because it refers to ethnic nationalism. In their pursuit of power, they left the idea of ethnicity behind, because it didn’t generate enough popular support. They found more success with a broader concept of what they refer to as open Swedishness — the idea that anyone can become a Swede as long as they adapt to the culture.

What they did, in effect, was widen the definition from ancestry to assimilation, from who you are to how you live.

If being a Swede is cultural rather than ethnic, then a teenager who has grown up in Sweden, speaks the language, shares the norms, and loves the country is, by their own definition, Swedish. Deporting these youngsters begins to feel like expelling a fragment of your own society. So in one sense the party remains true to its foundational instinct — keeping Sweden Swedish. But widen the concept of Swedish far enough, and migration replacement can be framed as: we’re just replacing ourselves with ourselves.

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A political decision is a line, and it has to be drawn somewhere. Every line creates cases on the wrong side. This deportation pause, put in place due to some individual cases, may save someone who should stay, but it also lets others stay who definitely shouldn’t.

At its core, politics is collective decisions that handle categories, and some individuals will inevitably find themselves on the wrong side of what the decision intended — in both directions. Someone who should be allowed to stay gets deported. Someone who should be deported gets to stay.

And the more individual stories become visible, selected by media or gone viral on social media, the more obvious the bluntness of the line becomes.

The Swedish government has now halted deportations of minors who have turned eighteen, because media pressure built around a handful of sympathetic cases. The sympathetic teenager highlighted in the media becomes the face of the policy, while the less sympathetic cases, of those who really should go, disappear into statistical darkness. The ones no camera will find, because their stories don’t fit the narrative.

The question is what you do with these cases, on both sides of the line. Media can find someone who should be allowed to stay despite the rules saying otherwise. But for every such case, there are others who are not caught by the rules at all, who meet the formal criteria to remain, but who by any honest assessment do not belong and should leave. The line fails them both, in opposite directions.

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There used to be a time in Sweden when you could write to the king.

If a decision struck you unjustly, too blind to your particular circumstances, you could plead to the crown directly. The rule still stood, but through royal dispensation the individual case could be lifted out of the rule without weakening it.

In the current system, one emotional edge case often leads to a general rule change. One person should be allowed to stay, so the whole system gets paused, and suddenly a lot more people are allowed to stay who definitely shouldn’t. The exception swallows the rule.

The king, before the constitutional reform of 1974, could grant mercy in the singular case without altering the general order.

And the exception would cut in both directions. Someone who had technically met the criteria to stay but clearly did not belong — who had spent their time in Sweden tormenting Swedish children, using ethnic slurs, treating the country as a place to extract from rather than belong to — the king could remove them too. The same visible personal judgment that could let someone stay could also send someone home.

The king would stake his judgment publicly. If he let someone stay who later committed serious crimes, that would not be “the system” failing. It would be the king’s judgment failing, and he would carry it for life. His firstborn would inherit the institution and its memory. When a real person puts his name behind a decision, something fundamentally differs from the machinery of government, where most decisions are made by anonymous civil servants and everyone can say they were just following procedure.

A system of royal dispensation would of course be vulnerable to favoritism and media-driven mercy campaigns. That is part of why modern states moved toward procedural systems in the first place. But we are talking about individual cases, relatively low stakes in isolation, and it would disarm the very mechanism that is causing the current problem — media using individual stories to change the general rules. Instead of a pressured migration minister stating it doesn’t feel right in his heart, he could refer the case to the nation’s conscience through the king and let the individual put forward their plea.

And from the petitioner’s side, the point becomes almost stronger.

Before the king, a person must appear as an individual. Who are you? What have you done? Why do you belong here? What would Sweden lose by sending you away?

That forces something the current system does not require, an articulated case for belonging. Not the assertion of a right, “I have the right to stay”, but a request: “I am asking to be allowed to stay, and here is why.” Gratitude, respect for the country, understanding of the law, responsibility for one’s own situation. It reveals something about a person’s character. And the community could speak too. References, both good and bad, the neighbors, the teachers, the employers, classmates.

Sweden stops being just a place you apply to remain in. Sweden becomes someone you address.

And consider the cases on the other side. The ones who stayed, who technically checked the boxes, but who spent their years calling Swedish children “Swedish devils,” who called Swedish girls “Swedish whores.” Imagine them standing before the king, making their case for why they should be the exception to the rule and be allowed to remain. And with the exception cutting both ways, young Swedes could petition the king themselves — why is this person still here, given what they have done to us?

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When politicians say “it doesn’t feel right in my heart,” it is sentimentality, a feeling that says this is sad. Conscience asks something different: what is right in this particular case, without destroying the order?

The Swedish right with the Sweden Democrats is softening because the concept of Swedishness has shifted — as a consequence of their own logic. They moved from ethnicity to culture, and now culture is pleading its case back at them. But the fundamental problem of politics still remains. Collective decisions can never fully accommodate individual fates.

In the process of dismantling the king as a political entity, Sweden also became faceless. It is not that long ago that we understood that order alone is not enough. Someone must also carry the burden of the exception. The constitutional reform of 1974 transferred the king’s remaining powers to the government, ending a tradition that had existed for over a thousand years.

The real danger is not that modern politics lacks compassion. It is that compassion now arrives collectively, impulsively, through media pressure and emotional waves, rather than through visible personal judgment carried by someone forced to live with the consequences.

Today there is only the system, and our system has no heart to feel right or wrong in.

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My books When Migration Becomes Conflict, Orania: Building a Nation, Parallel Order and Among Boers and Britons are all available on Amazon.