The Romanian migrants’ campsite in Stockholm.
The Swedish Enforcement Agency (Kronofogden) carried out the eviction in Högdalen, a suburb in the southern reaches of Stockholm, at 9am on Monday, just days after a bus load of the campers went home. "All I know is that it’s more or less empty," Henrik Brånstad, spokesman at the agency, told the TT news agency.
"Many have apparently moved to other places while others have jumped at the chance of a bus ride home to Romania." Over 100 EU-migrants accepted the bus tickets home, many of whom had earned money begging in the Swedish capital. One of the buses crashed in southern Sweden on Sunday morning on the way to Bucharest. Only the driver was injured.
Many of them said they plan to come back to Sweden soon. One woman told the Aftonbladet newspaper that she had nothing to go home to in Romania.
"We’re planning to come back in two or three weeks," she told the paper.
In Borås, central Sweden, around 40 Romanians accepted a bus ride home in December last year. Many of them were back again in January, reported the TT news agency.
Anna Johansson at Swedish charity Stockholms Stadsmission has recently been in Romania and isn’t surprised that people choose to return to Sweden.
"They realize that there are better opportunities to support themselves here," she said.
She added that her organization was working hard to help, and pointed to Oslo’s successful provision of a magazine for Romanians to sell, similar to the Situation Stockholm paper sold by homeless people in Sweden’s capital.
