Model Immigrants No More: Sweden’s Elder Care Nightmare

By John Gustavsson

Sunday, April 26, 2026

 

Sweden’s experience with virtually unrestricted immigration has drastically changed the country’s image. Many in the West know that Sweden has struggled to assimilate millions of asylum seekers and that tensions from this failure have contributed to increased violent and sexual crime. Less well-known is how much of that sexual crime targets the elderly — and how often it is perpetrated by the very people hired by the public sector to care for them.

 

What is happening to the elderly in Sweden is yet another warning for the West about the consequences of unchecked migration.

 

In Sweden, looking after the elderly is the responsibility of the welfare state; only 1 percent of the elderly live with their children. Most of the Swedish welfare state is not managed by the state, however, but by the country’s 290 municipalities. This includes the provision of elder care.

 

But Sweden’s population is aging, and staffing is becoming a problem. To fill the gap, municipalities have turned to immigrants. While welfare is handled by municipalities, immigration policy is a matter for the state. When mass immigration to Sweden escalated in the 2010s, municipalities were forced to adapt to the new circumstances. Communities that had been promised an influx of doctors and engineers by politicians in Stockholm instead often found themselves saddled with young men without verifiable qualifications and with little knowledge of either Swedish or English.

 

The backbone of Sweden’s elder care is Hemtjänsten, the municipal home-care service that helps the elderly live at home longer by providing mainly nonmedical services — delivering meals, cleaning, and assisting with bathing and toileting. As with health care, the ability to choose a provider is limited, and care recipients have no legal right to refuse opposite-sex carers.

 

Faced with a surplus of unemployable migrants and a shortage of carers, many municipalities turned elder care into an unofficial jobs program, creating caregiving positions and hiring migrants — mostly men — who could not find work elsewhere.

 

The number of migrants working with the elderly quickly became a point of pride on the left. Migrants in care occupations were held up as model immigrants taking on jobs that Swedes wouldn’t do.

 

But now, an official investigation into rapes of the elderly has found that most nonmarital rapes since 2021 were committed by Hemtjänst carers or staff at municipal nursing homes. Most of the perpetrators are migrants, and some have even recorded or photographed their crimes on their phones.

 

Municipalities have in several instances been complicit in covering up cases or attempting to silence victims. In some cases, caregivers reported for rape have been reassigned but allowed to continue working with other patients.

 

Why is this? First, politicians may naturally fear political backlash when individuals held up as “model immigrants” are then implicated in serious crimes. Left-wing politicians in municipalities with large foreign populations also tend to rely on minority votes to stay in power, making them especially reluctant to confront migrant crime.

 

Second, the pragmatic reality is that carers are still needed. When Gothenburg introduced a requirement that foreign, non-Swedish-educated applicants for preschool teacher positions demonstrate proficiency in Swedish, not a single applicant passed the test.

 

Today, people with foreign backgrounds make up a majority of home-care staff in major cities like Uppsala, where one of the most serious cover-ups occurred. Some evidence suggests that the presence of unskilled migrants in elder care professions has made these jobs less attractive to Swedes as Swedish caregivers end up having to babysit their foreign co-workers, worsening the very staffing problem migrants were meant to solve.

 

Finally, there’s the motive.

 

Policymakers are understandably worried that voters may link these rapes to another new form of crime Swedes have dubbed “förnedringsrån” — “humiliation robbery” — where the aim is not merely theft but the humiliation of the victim. Migrant youth gangs will target ethnic Swedish teenagers, rob them of their possessions, and force them to perform degrading acts, often while recording. In one case, a 16-year-old Somali migrant forced an eight-year old boy to strip naked and do push-ups after seizing his bike. In police interviews, the 16-year-old claimed he did it because the child looked like he would vote for the national-conservative Sweden Democrats in the future. There are eerie similarities between these robberies targeting the young and the sexual assaults targeting the old.

 

Even though authorities still refuse to treat crimes against Swedes as hate crimes, these rapes and robberies are nevertheless viewed by many Swedes as a way for the perpetrators to send a message: This is not your country anymore.

 

For Swedish policymakers who have long clung to the belief that providing sufficient welfare, education, and job opportunities is all that it takes for any immigrant to assimilate, it’s hard to face the stark reality that some migrants actually carry a deep-seated, irrational hatred toward the country that let them in.

 

In 2022, Sweden elected a right-wing coalition government supported by the Sweden Democrats. Since then, great strides have been made in several areas: Asylum applications have dropped to a 40-year low, deportations have skyrocketed, and shootings were reduced by half last year while homicides fell to their lowest level in a decade.

 

Yet, the abuse of the elderly continues, enabled by a combination of underreporting and the continuing efforts of the left-wing Social Democratic Party — which governs half of Sweden’s municipalities and retains vast institutional power — to shield predators. The Social Democrats have even attempted to stop demonstrations on the issue from taking place in municipalities they control. Still, there are some signs of progress. New rules to improve language proficiency among carers will take effect on July 1, and the Sweden Democrats are pushing for a national inquiry into sexual crimes against the elderly by caregivers, along with lifetime sentences for the perpetrators.

 

While its achievements should be commended, Sweden’s right-wing government has, after almost four years in power, largely failed to confront and break the institutional power of the Social Democrats. Until the government does so, Sweden’s elderly will remain victims of the country’s failed multicultural experiment.