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IMMIGRATION

Politics in Sweden: The migration paradigm shift we need isn’t the one we’re getting

Malfunctioning bureaucracy at the Migration Agency is the single biggest hurdle to Sweden's ability to attract international talent – and yet it receives shockingly little attention in the political debate, writes The Local's editor Emma Löfgren.

Politics in Sweden: The migration paradigm shift we need isn't the one we're getting
The Migration Agency's waiting times are still too long, writes The Local's editor. Photo: Janerik Henriksson/TT

Earlier this month, the Migration Agency in a press release cheered that it had been able to shorten the processing time for receiving Swedish citizenship last year.

It felt rather like the passively polite automated voice in a phone queue. “You are number 10,549 in the queue. Thank you for waiting. Your call is important to us.”

Because although cutting the median waiting time from 330 to 256 days is a step forward, it’s not good enough.

Elsewhere on its website, the agency regularly updates the current expected waiting times for cases to be processed (based not so much on the actual expected waiting time, because such an estimate does not exist, but instead on the maximum time that 75 percent of “recent applicants” had to wait for a decision).

At the time of writing, they show that if you’re applying for citizenship, you may have to wait 40 months, an increase of one month since September 2022.

If you’re a doctoral student applying for your first permit, five months. Renewing your permit, six months. Applying for permanent residency? Congratulations, 14 months.

If you’re a work permit holder renewing your permit, brace yourself for a wait of anything between half a year to almost two years, depending on which industry you work in and whether or not your employer is certified with the Migration Agency.

Run your own business? Get comfortable, you’ll be in the queue for 28 months.

Thank you for waiting. Your call is important to us.

Meanwhile, several industries are crying out for workers.

The booming tech scene – the crowning glory of modern Sweden – will have a shortage of 25,000 game developers in ten years if the industry’s current growth rate continues, according to a recent report by the Swedish Games Industry and the Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth.

Yet getting your foot on the ladder has become near-impossible after a law change last year, which shortened work permits for trial periods from two years to six months. This means the applicant might still be waiting for a renewed permit when their existing one runs out, and risks losing the right to work, they argue.

Squeezed out before their career in Sweden has even begun.

“The processing times are so long and the permit times so short that the [Migration Agency] can’t keep up. (…) If the current situation is not resolved, Sweden’s entire image is threatened and it will be harder for companies to recruit staff to the country,” they continue, calling for simplified rules and automated processes.

In a new opinion piece for the Svenska Dagbladet newspaper, the chair of SULF – the trade union for people working in academia – writes about highly qualified researchers who simply packed their bags and quit Sweden after being stuck in a never-ending loop of permit bureaucracy.

One was rejected after Migration Agency delays meant that once it finally gave them a decision, they no longer had enough time left on their contract to qualify for a permit.

“Sweden’s talent intake is being throttled,” writes SULF chair Sanna Wolk.

There are a few caveats to consider, not least that talent is a strange concept by which to measure people’s worth – awkward at best, dehumanising at worst.

The current right-wing government, and the left-wing government before it, are so busy trying to perform a balancing act of cracking down on some migrants while attracting other migrants, that long processing times gets shockingly little political attention.

There will always be routes for international talent to come to Sweden, they insist. But out of 2,255 applications for a shiny new talent visa since it was launched in June last year, only 20 percent have so far received a decision. Of those, only 10 percent were successful. Polishing the hood doesn’t fix a broken engine. 

And amid all the talk about paradigm shifts, they fail to understand that we exist in the same paradigm. That long waits, language tests, tightened citizenship rules – or even just taking it for granted that people will always want to come to Sweden, no matter how high the barriers – affect most migrants, and affect all who care.

Time and time again, the Parliamentary Ombudsman – the top watchdog in the country – has criticised the Migration Agency’s long processing times, put down both to the agency’s own flawed administration and a lack of resources from the government.

Cutting queues and red tape may not be as politically sexy as cracking down on refugees, not as headline-grabbing a word as paradigm shift. But it’s the single biggest hurdle right now to Sweden’s ability to attract the international talent it claims to need.

In other news

One of Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson’s top aides resigned from his post after it emerged that he had been fined by police for illegally fishing for eels and had twice lied to the authorities about what happened.

In a joint press conference last week, Moderate Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard and Sweden Democrat parliamentary group leader Henrik Vinge announced the campaign, which they hope will discourage refugees from coming to Sweden.

Muharrem Demirok is expected to be voted in as the new leader of the Centre Party at a party conference on Thursday. The newly elected member of parliament and former deputy mayor of Linköping will take over from leader Annie Lööf. Here’s The Local’s guide to why his role matters.

What’s next?

Kristersson has invited the leaders of Sweden’s eight main parties to a meeting at 5pm on Tuesday to discuss national security, in the wake of protests against Sweden in several Muslim countries.

Politics in Sweden is a weekly column by Editor Emma Löfgren looking at the big talking points and issues in Swedish politics. Members of The Local Sweden can sign up to receive an email alert when the column is published. Just click on this “newsletters” option or visit the menu bar.

Member comments

  1. People caught in the permit maze do not vote, so it is hard to find a way to have voice and be heard.
    Maybe something will be done when Volvo loses half of its highly specialized engineering workforce.

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BREXIT

OPINION: Sweden should follow Denmark and reconsider Brexit deportations

Hundreds of Brits who failed to secure post-Brexit residency in Denmark will be given a second chance. Sweden should offer the same kind of amnesty, writes The Local’s editor Emma Löfgren.

OPINION: Sweden should follow Denmark and reconsider Brexit deportations

The Danish government this week announced that British nationals who missed the deadline for post-Brexit residency will be allowed to apply or reapply.

At least 350 British nationals who lived in Denmark at the time of Brexit failed to apply to remain in the country before the deadline of the end of December 2021, and many were subsequently given orders to leave.

But after criticism from rights groups, who accused Danish immigration authorities of not correctly applying the rules of the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, the government on Monday announced that the initial deadline will now be extended until the end of 2023.

It is time for Sweden to follow Denmark’s lead.

Sweden has ordered more Brits to leave since Brexit than any other EU state. Eurostat data reveals that about 2,205 UK citizens were ordered to leave EU countries between 2020 and September 2022 – with around half of this number from Sweden alone.

It’s hard to get clarity into the facts behind these figures, with authorities conceding there could be some degree of inaccuracy, including people being counted twice. They also include people turned away on the border, so they could also include Brits who never lived in Sweden nor had the right to stay post-Brexit.

At The Local, our reporters have repeatedly contacted both the Migration Agency and the border police for more information, which each authority directing us to the other.

But other figures such as rejected applications support the claim that Sweden has turned away an unusually high number of Brits compared to other EU states.

What we know for sure is that Swedish migration authorities rejected a total of 2,155 applications for post-Brexit residence status between November 2020 and December 2022. It’s not clear how many of these were denied because they arrived after the deadline, but data suggests these were a few hundred at most.

Several readers of The Local have told us they wrongly believed they already had the right to stay in Sweden and did not need to apply for residence status, due to confusion over similar-sounding terms such as residence permit, residence card and residence status.

Late applications are however not Sweden’s only problem.

Other reasons for a rejected application, according to a Migration Agency spokesperson, include “incomplete applications, applications where the applicant did not fulfil the requirement for residence status, and applications listed as ‘reason unknown’”.

They also include people such as Gregory – who had lived in Sweden for 21 years but was in between jobs at the time of the deadline, which meant he did not qualify for residence status. Or Kathleen Poole, a bedbound grandmother with Alzheimer’s.

When The Local in early February asked Swedish Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard to explain the high figures, she said they came as “complete news” to her.

“We want them here,” she told us.

She said she could not explain the figures and promised to look into them, but after chasing her office for nearly two months, our reporters have yet to receive a reply.

It’s not as if the risk of deportations should have come as a surprise to anyone.

In the run-up to the Brexit deadline for residency, The Local carried a warning by a leading Facebook group for Brits in Sweden that authorities in the country were not doing enough to reach UK citizens to make them aware of the date.

Malmer Stenergard’s party wasn’t in government at the time, but she chaired the Swedish parliament’s social security committee, which processed the government’s bill on post-Brexit residence status for Brits – a bill the group Brits in Sweden had warned put a concerningly large number at risk of losing their right to stay.

Decision-makers in Sweden have less freedom than their Danish counterparts to influence decisions by government agencies such as the Migration Agency, with so-called “minister rule” being frowned upon – an issue that was brought to its head during the Covid pandemic.

But it should be possible to at least do what Denmark has done and allow those who missed the deadline a chance to reapply and be tried on the same terms as everyone else.

In any case, Brits affected by Brexit deportations deserve an answer, not just silence.

Denmark has found a (half) solution. Sweden, we’re waiting.

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