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RESIDENCY PERMITS

Why is Sweden’s 2021 migration law leading to ‘teen deportations’?

Children of foreigners working in Sweden who turn 18 before the Migration Agency makes a decision on their parents’ permanent residency are being forced to leave Sweden in the growing phenomenon of "teen deportations". Andreas Bråthe, partner at Ernst and Young, explained what is happening.

Published: 4 November 2022 13:07 CET
Why is Sweden's 2021 migration law leading to 'teen deportations'?
The Migration Agency's offices. Photo: Adam Wrafter/SvD/TT

Sweden’s migration legislation was updated in July 2021, following long struggle by the then red-green government to agree the new policy with the right-wing opposition parties in a joint Migration Committee. 

The new law largely confirmed the stricter migration policy that the Social Democrats and Green Party brought in back in 2016 in the wake of the 2015 refugee crisis, with those granted asylum in Sweden given temporary rather than permanent residency, and the length of time applicants needed to live in Sweden before applying for permanent residency extended to three years. 

However, the new law also introduced a requirement that everyone seeking permanent residency in Sweden should be able to show that they can support themselves financially for at least 18 months, starting from the time the Migration Agency examines their application.

According to Andreas Bråthe, partner at Ernst and Young, the change is increasingly catching out foreigners working in Sweden who arrived in Sweden with a work permit and children of 14 to 17 years old. 
 

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“The changes meant, among other things, that new requirements were imposed for everyone who applies for a permanent residence permit, which meant new rules for both main applicants as well as their family members,” he told The Local.

This, Bråthe said, was affecting “family members traveling with their partners, spouses or parents”, who “rely on the main applicant taking the financial responsibility due to their employment”.

To get permanent residence, all of the dependants over the age of 18 now need to show that they are able to support themselves and earn enough to cover their housing needs, plus a so-called “normal payment”, which is set this year at 5,157 kronor a month. 

“There are many cases where the family members are put in a situation where they need to find employment, sometimes with limited resources,” he said. ” Even if the financial need is not required for their private household, this is a must in order to fullfil the requirement for permanent residency.” 

Does this problem affect all residency extensions? 

No. The rules are different depending on whether the Migration Agency is assessing eligibility for permanent residence or for an extension to a work permit.

To be issued a time limited permit as a family member of a work permit holder the applicant can be up to 21, if dependent on their parent.

However if the dependent is eligible for permanent residence and is over the age of 18, they need to meet the maintenance requirement. 

Furthermore, if the parent is issued a permanent residence permit, the child, if they are over 18, are no longer eligible for a permit as a dependent family member of a work permit holder. 

Is it not enough for the parent to show that they can support the 18-year-old?

No. 

“There is not an option for the main applicant to go in and “cover” for the income that the dependent needs in order to meet the requirement,” Bråthe says. “Instead the assessment is made for each applicant separately, regardless of whether they share household and costs together with their family members.” 

How long do the dependents need to prove they can support themselves? 

They need to show that they have permanent employment for at least 18 months after the day the application is examined, which given the long delays in processing means a much longer contract might be necessary. 

“The regulation states that the ability to support oneself must be of a certain duration,” Bråthe said.

“The Swedish Migration Agency considers you to have met the duration requirement if you have permanent employment, or fixed-term employment of at least 18 months from the day the application is examined. In practice, an even longer employment duration is needed due to overdue and long processing time at the Swedish Migration Agency.” 

Given many 18-year-olds are at the start of their careers, they also face the problem that the agency does not count someone who is still in the six-month probation period as having a contract. 

“Even in cases where the main applicant’s dependents have signed new employment contracts, they are most likely covered by probationary periods,” he said. “In those cases, the Migration Agency can reject the permanent residency application since they do not consider the duration requirement to have been fulfilled.”

How much do you have to earn, and what counts?

Income from one or more part-time jobs is included in the maintenance requirement, as well as parental pay and sick pay, Bråthe told The Local.

There is no specific figure that you have to earn – it varies from case to case – but applicants must earn enough to cover their housing costs and a so-called “normal amount”, which consists of 5,175 kronor per month for an adult, increasing for those applying alongside dependent family members or children.

The income can’t come from savings or support from other family members. 

Who is most affected by this?

The new legislation particularly affects households where only one member of the family (the “breadwinner”) works, earning enough to support the rest of the household financially.

Even if a family as a whole has enough money to support itself, the new law demands that applicants must earn enough of their own money to fulfil the maintenance requirement regardless, putting dependent family members of the “breadwinner”, such as partners, spouses, parents or adult children in a situation where they need to find employment.

One of the risks of the legislation is that family members without an income – or with insufficient income – do not meet work permit requirements, and are instead given time-limited permits, or in the worst-case scenario, deportation notices.

For spouses who can’t meet the income requirement, the next option is to get a time limited permit as a family member of a permanent residence permit holder. Children over the age of 18, however, are not eligible for this. 

Is it possible to get an exemption from the maintenance requirement? 

The law does give the agency leeway to make exceptions for those who “for other special reasons cannot support themselves”, but the agency does not seem to be applying this in cases of 18-year-olds who are still living at home while retaking their school leaving exams or taking a gap year. 

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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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