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RESIDENCY PERMITS

EXPLAINED: Sweden’s planned changes to residence permit applications

Applicants for temporary work or residence permits in Sweden must currently travel to a Swedish embassy or consulate for an ID check. The government is now working on a solution to avoid this, although it will only apply to people from visa-free countries.

Published: 22 February 2023 11:46 CET
Updated: 26 February 2023 08:49 CET
EXPLAINED: Sweden's planned changes to residence permit applications
The Swedish Embassy in Copenhagen. Photo: Johan Nilsson/TT

Who is affected by the current rules?

The current rules, which came in in November 2022, affect all applicants for temporary residence or work permits in Sweden.

The rules, designed to better check applicants’ identities when applying for residence or work permits, require prospective permit holders to show their passport at a Swedish embassy or consulate abroad before the permit can be granted.

Why does the government want to change the rules?

The rules mean that some applicants are forced to travel long distances to show their passports at an embassy or consulate, incurring substantial costs for applicants and also delaying their applications if they are unable to travel straight away.

Many Swedish universities have also raised concerns over the new rules and their impact on foreign students and researchers, which Education Minister Mats Persson has described as having “disproportionate consequences”.

“The government doesn’t want Sweden to become less competitive,” Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard wrote in a press statement. “Therefore, we’re taking necessary measures to make it easier for people who do not require visas to enter Sweden to be able to show their passports in person for checks.”

Why is it only for applicants from countries which don’t require a visa?

Although the work or residence permit application process for all non-EU citizens is broadly similar, applicants from countries requiring a visa to Sweden need to be fingerprinted and photographed at a Swedish embassy or consulate before they are able to enter Sweden.

Applicants from visa-free countries, however, can enter Sweden without a visa and be fingerprinted and photographed at a Migration Agency office once they have arrived.

This means that, even if Sweden were to make it easier for those who require a visa to validate their identity in person, they would still have to travel to an embassy or consulate to complete their applications.

Which countries require a visa to enter Sweden?

Citizens of these countries require a visa to enter Sweden.

As a general rule, citizens of most (but not all) non-EU countries staying in Sweden for less than 90 days will need to apply for a visa, while those staying for longer than 90 days should apply for a residence or work permit instead.

In almost all cases, you will need to apply for a permit or visa before entering Sweden, although some exceptions do apply.

Will I still be able to show my passport at a consulate or embassy?

For now, yes, and this appears unlikely to change in the future.

One of the current solutions proposed would be introducing mobile teams from the Migration Agency, which would visit certain cities near large universities abroad – in Canada and the USA, for example, where many applicants to Sweden come from – where applicants from visa-free countries could show their passports for checks.

As these proposed teams would only be on-site for a very short period in specific areas close to where many applicants come from, and are designed as an extra complement to the current system, it seems unlikely that Sweden would stop accepting passports at embassies and consulates entirely, as this would instead provide more bottlenecks in the system, not less.

The government will officially task the Migration Agency with providing a solution to this issue when it meets on February 23rd.

Member comments

  1. I’m happy they are making this change for people from countries that don’t require a visa. In my experience, some employees of Swedish embassies insist that even students who come from countries that do NOT require a visa to enter (such as Costa Rica), must also travel to the nearest embassy for photos and fingerprints. I had a long email debate with an employee of the Guatemala City Swedish embassy who insisted that I must travel there (this was in 2021 prior to the passport check rules) for photos and fingerprints even though there was no written rule requiring it. The employee didn’t care that due to my work schedule limiting my ability to travel, traveling to Guatemala City would cause me to receive my travel documents so late that I would be able to arrive in Sweden to an empty, unfurnished apartment only two days before my classes started at the university. The Swedish government made getting here a hellish experience for me.

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For members

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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