ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the control system before and after the breaking point in the end of the 1980s. It describes internal and external control methods and discusses their interrelations. The chapter discusses how a long tradition of keeping immigration policy outside party politics came to a sudden end, as well as some of the consequences thereof. A distinction between general and individual control is useful. The former aims at steering the flows of migration, whereas the objective of the latter is to check individual aliens, for example, to exclude persons with personal characteristics like criminality, terrorism, poverty, illness or some special disease (HIV), or perhaps some religious faith or cultural behaviour, or even ethnicity. The peak of labour migration to Sweden occurred in 1969-70, and the recruitment of foreign labour was terminated two years later, during a short recession in February 1972.
