Salim Iskef had just bought a house and his upcoming wedding was going to be the high point of the life he was building in Sweden, a decade after escaping war in Syria.
Instead, on Thursday, hundreds of people filed into the church where he was meant to marry in July, to attend his funeral.
“We had decided how many children we wanted to have,” said Kareen Elia, Mr. Iskef’s fiancée.
Mr. Iskef, 28, was one of 10 people killed on Tuesday by a man who went on a shooting spree at an adult education center in the city of Orebro. Sweden’s prime minister has called it the worst mass shooting in the country’s history.
The shooting has left the country stunned, trying to understand how a nation at peace and known for high living standards also has one of the highest rates of gun violence in the European Union.
In recent years, Sweden has revisited its once-welcoming asylum policies, with many Swedes souring on immigration and blaming it for rising crime and violence. That view, in turn, has boosted the popularity of anti-immigrant politicians, primarily on the far right.
For some immigrants, the massacre in Orebro — apparently committed by a Swede — at a center frequented by migrants, Campus Risbergska, reinforced the sense that their adopted country no longer felt welcoming.
“When we came to Sweden, it felt like a safe country; we could adapt to society,” said Ms. Elia, who had also fled Syria. “But we don’t have that same feeling of security anymore. There are things happening all the time.”
Mr. Iskef arrived in 2015 from Aleppo, Syria, quickly learned Swedish and found work at a travel agency. When the coronavirus hit, he enrolled at Campus Risbergska. For many migrants, the center had become a way into Swedish society, through language and education.
Orebro, once Sweden’s shoemaking capital, has grown and become steadily more diverse as Sweden has absorbed waves of newcomers: refugees from wars in the Balkans in the 1990s and then from wars in the Middle East and the Horn of Africa in this century. Between 2016 and 2018, as many as 10,000 people moved to the city, said Erik Blohm, Orebro’s head of urban planning.
As the city’s demographics changed, so did its services. Campus Risbergska was once a high school two miles from the city center that closed down in 2016 as students dwindled. In 2017, it reopened as an adult education center that offered free Swedish lessons for immigrants, as well as training for jobs ranging from construction to child care, and classes toward a high school diploma, Mr. Blohm said.
The city recognizes that a key to immigrant success “is to integrate people and get them to work,” he said.
While the growth countered a declining native population, some neighborhoods became crowded with new arrivals who could not afford housing elsewhere, and were plagued by the criminal gangs fueling Sweden’s rising crime. Vivalla, an area on the outskirts of the city, is one of Orebro’s most diverse communities and one of those categorized by the police as a vulnerable neighborhood with heightened threats to safety.
This week, residents gathered at a community center there to voice their fears and frustrations.
Much of the talk in the neighborhood has been about what the reaction would have been if the gunman had been an immigrant, “someone who looked like one of us,” said Cissi, a youth worker who asked that her surname not be used for fear of retribution.
There is also growing resentment among the young people she works with, who know that “the right is very active,” she added. “They don’t feel welcome in society because of what they look like.”
The police have not publicly identified the gunman, who was found dead in addition to 10 others, or shared any details about a possible motive. Swedish news outlets have identified him as Rickard Andersson, 35, who lived alone in an apartment near the school. The New York Times has not independently confirmed his identity.
The shooting has prompted debates about gun violence and gang wars fueled by the drug trade. Sweden began keeping national figures on shootings less than nine years ago, during a crime wave. There were 281 shootings in 2017, the first full year figures were collected; the number peaked at 391 in 2022 and then fell to 296 in 2024, according to police figures.
On Friday, the government announced a plan to tighten already strict gun laws, making it more difficult to gain access to semiautomatic weapons. It will also enhance police and medical checks in license applications.
New gun legislation was already being planned, based on the findings of a 2022 inquiry. After the Orebro attack, lawmakers moved to fast track the measure.
Police investigators said this week that they had traced four firearm licenses to the suspect. At the scene, the police said, they found the gunman’s body with three weapons, including what appeared to be a rifle, and a large cache of ammunition.
“We do not know the motive of this perpetrator, but we understand that one of the consequences is fear among migrants,” said Christer Mattsson, director of the Segerstedt Institute, which studies violence spurred by prejudice at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. “And we have to allow that fear to become part of that discussion.”
At vocational colleges across the country, migrants are feeling more vulnerable in the wake of the attack, said Michael Williams, a board member of the Swedish Network of Refugee Support Groups, known by the acronym FARR. The attack compounded the sense of unease that migrants and asylum seekers already feel in Sweden.
A decade ago, Sweden proudly took in tens of thousands of refugees, streaming into Europe from wars in Syria and Afghanistan. But that generosity soon waned as migration strained the public resources of Sweden, a nation of 10.5 million people, and fanned resentment toward newcomers.
The 2022 election produced a conservative governing coalition of Sweden’s Moderates, Liberals and Christian Democrats, all parties that had embraced policies to limit migration, cap benefits for migrants and create a stricter path toward integration.
The coalition needed the votes of the Sweden Democrats, a nationalist, anti-immigrant right-wing party, to win majority support and form a government. The Sweden Democrats remain outside the government, but with some influence over it.
The new government has passed laws targeting criminal gangs, laws that Mr. Williams said disproportionately affect migrants and asylum seekers, who often live in high-crime areas.
The country has moved far from its former commitment to the right to asylum, which made it a haven for those fleeing war. Sweden’s new immigration policy is tough on family migration and describes immigrants who do not have the express right to remain as a “shadow society.”
“The parties say they want integration, but their policies are pushing to make integration impossible,” Mr. Williams said.
