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WORK PERMITS

INTERVIEW: ‘Work permit law is a turning point for talent deportations’

Ali Omumi, the Iranian engineer whose work permit struggles helped bring Sweden's talent deportations to attention, tells The Local how optimistic he is that Sweden's new work permit law will help solve the problem.

Published: 9 May 2022 17:02 CEST
INTERVIEW: 'Work permit law is a turning point for talent deportations'
Ali Omumi 's case has helped raise awareness of talent deportations. Photo: Centrum för Rättvisa

“The changes are so promising,” Omumi says. “What we see right now, finally, is an intention to stop kompetensutvisningar [talent deportations], something we didn’t see in previous years. Now, we see they are taking action.”

Omumi currently works as Area Sales Manager for Hitachi Energy Sweden at the same time as running Real People, a campaign group for a fairer work environment in Sweden. 

One of the changes he thinks will make the biggest difference is the end to the so-called ‘seven-year rule’, which empowers the Migration Agency to consider employers’ and employees’ adherence to the terms of prior work permits going back as far as seven years. 

READ ALSO: Sweden’s new work permit law and the ‘seven-year rule’

It’s a rule that has dogged Omumi’s own work permit cases, both back in 2018 and again two and a half months ago. 

“The Migration Agency is allowed to investigate going back in time up to seven years, and if there is any mistake, like in my own case, I had one insurance missing, and it was not fixable retrospectively, they will reject an extension.” 

“Just two and a half months ago, I received a letter from Migrationsverket, applying the seven-year rule, so they investigated my history of immigration, and they found the same mistake again. I was going to get a negative decision again for the same thing, you call it in English, ‘double jeopardy’.”
 
When the new work permit law comes into force on June 1st, however, the Migration Agency is supposed to take a forward-looking approach, Omumi says, with more of an emphasis on the terms of the job during the work permit period, and less emphasis on past permits. 
 
The new work permit law also includes language specifically targeting talent deportations, stating that a work permit extension should not be denied as a consequence of “minor errors”, or “if the denial does not seem proportionate given the general circumstances”. 
 
Here Omumi agrees with those who worry that this clause still leaves too much up to the Migration Agency’s interpretation. 
 
“This is a matter of how a case officer at the Migration Agency is going to implement it or quantify it, because we don’t know, for example, if lacking a certain insurance for maybe six months is minor, but more than six months is not, so there are a lot of question marks.” 
 
Perhaps surprisingly, Omumi is not too worried about the Swedish government’s new plan to bring back the skills shortage test for work permits, meaning that employers would need to show that hires from overseas were in a profession, or had skills, lacking in Sweden. 
 
“If you already have the expertise and the competencies in the country, there is no point in bringing people from abroad. It’s a bad decision economically to let everyone in, of course,” he says. 
 
In the long run, tightening up work permit requirements will reduce opposition to labour migration, he predicts. 
 
“I think it’s going to remedy the damaged reputation, maybe not in the short term, but in the long term, because these changes sound very promising.”

The timing of Omumi’s current case means that he risks not benefiting from the rule coming in on June 1st. 

“At the end of February, we got a letter saying this is not a decision, but you have not fulfilled the criteria to either get a permanent residence or another extension, therefore you will be deported,” he says.

“They asked us to provide more arguments or more documentation supporting our application, so what my lawyers did, knowing that the law was going to change, they asked for an extension, and so we are given until 19th of May, which is only a few days until the new law comes into effect, so my lawyers are going to get another two weeks.”

“I am very much hopeful. I think I’m going to stay.

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WORKING IN SWEDEN

Half of those blocked by Sweden’s work permit salary threshold will be graduates

A new analysis by the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise has found that 51 percent of the labour migrants likely to be blocked by a new higher salary threshold will be graduates. Karin Johansson, the organisation's Deputy Director General, told The Local how this will hurt businesses.

Published: 22 April 2024 14:21 CEST
Half of those blocked by Sweden's work permit salary threshold will be graduates

When Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard received the results of a government inquiry into setting the median salary as the threshold for new work permits, she said that highly qualified foreign workers would not be affected. 

“This is an important step in our work to tighten requirements for low-qualified labour migrants and at the same time to liberalise and improve the rules for highly qualified labour migration,” she said. “Sweden should be an attractive country for highly qualified workers.” 

But according to the confederation’s new analysis, published last week, graduates will in fact make up the majority of those blocked from coming to Sweden, if the government increases the minimum salary to be eligible for a work permit to 34,200 kronor a month from the 27,400 kronor a month threshold which came into force last November. 

“The politicians’ argument does not hold up,” Johansson told The Local. “More than 50 percent of those who have this kind of salary are skilled workers with a graduate background. These are the people that that the government has said that they really want to have in Sweden. So we are a little bit surprised that they are still going to implement this higher salary threshold.” 

Of those earning between 80 percent of the median salary (27,360 kronor) and the median salary (34,200 kronor), the study found that 30 percent were working in jobs that required “extended, university-level competence”, and a further 21 percent in jobs requiring “university-level education or higher”. 

“They are technicians and engineers, and many of the others are also really skilled workers that are hard to find on the Swedish labour market at the moment,” Johansson said. 

The proposals made by inquiry were put out for consultation in February, with the Confederation of Swedish Enterprise planning to submit its response later this week. 

Johansson said that further raising the threshold risked exacerbating the serious labour shortage already suffered by Swedish companies. 

"In our recruitment survey, we have discovered that 30 percent of all planned hires never get made because companies cannot find the right people," she said. "Many companies are simply having to say 'no' to businesses. They can't expand. So, of course, it will have an impact on the Swedish economy if they now increase the salary threshold. We know that there will be fewer people coming from abroad to work in Sweden." 

Johansson said she had little faith in the exemption system proposed by the inquiry, under which the the Swedish Public Employment Service will draw up a list of proposed job descriptions or professions to be exempted, with the Migration Agency then vetting the list before sending it on to the government for a final decision. 

"The decision of who will be exempted will be in some way a political one, and in our experience, it's the companies that know best what kind of people they need," she said. "So we are not in favour of that kind of solution. But, of course, it's better than nothing." 

She said that companies were already starting to lobby politicians to ensure that the skills and professions they need to source internationally will be on the list of exemptions, a lobbying effort she predicted would get only more intense if and when the new higher salary requirement comes into force next June.  

"If you have a regulation, not every company can have an exemption. You need to say 'no' sometimes, and that will be hard for companies to accept," she predicted. "And then they will lobby against the government, so it will be messy. Certainly, it will be messy." 

Although there are as yet no statistics showing the impact of raising the minimum salary for a work permit to 80 percent of the median salary last November, Johansson said that her members were already reporting that some of their foreign employees were not having their work permits renewed. 

"What we are hearing is that many of the contracts companies have with labour from third countries have not been prolonged and the workers have left," she said. 

Rather than hiring replacements in Sweden, as the government has hoped, many companies were instead reducing the scale of their operations, she said. 

"The final solution is to say 'no' to business and many companies are doing that," she said. "If you take restaurants, for example, you might have noticed that many have shortened their opening hours, they have changed the menus so it's easier with fewer people in the kitchen. And also shops, the service sector, they have fewer staff."

To give a specific example, she said that Woolpower, a company based in Östersund that makes thermal underwear, supplying the Swedish Armed Forces, had been struggling to recruit internationally. 

"They have seamstresses from more than 20 different countries and it's more or less impossible to find a seamstress in Sweden today," she said. "It's really hard for them to manage the situation at the moment and they are a huge supplier to Swedish defence." 

She said that the new restrictions on hiring internationally were also forcing existing employees and also company owners to work harder.  

"Current employees need to work longer hours than they have done and if you're a small business, you, as an owner, will work more than you have done before," she said. 

The best solution, she said, would be to abolish the salary thresholds and return to Sweden's former work permit system, which required that international hires receive the salary and other benefits required under collective bargaining agreements with unions. 

But she said that the government's reliance on the support of the Sweden Democrats party, enshrined in the Tidö Agreement, meant this was unlikely to happen. 

"This is the result of the Tidö Agreement, and you if you take away one single piece of this agreement, I think maybe everything will fall apart. So I think it's hard. When we discuss this with the different parties, they all agree that they want to push ahead with it. But it's the Sweden Democrats who put this on the table when they made their agreement." 

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