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STUDYING IN SWEDEN

Sweden to ramp up drive to retain foreign students and researchers

The government has tasked a new inquiry with figuring out how to make Sweden a more attractive destination for foreign students, doctoral students and researchers – while cracking down on permit cheats.

Published: 8 April 2024 15:06 CEST
Sweden to ramp up drive to retain foreign students and researchers
Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard, of the Moderate Party, and Education Minister Mats Persson, of the Liberals, at a press conference at the Karolinska Institute on April 8th. Photo: Anders Wiklund/TT

Forty-one percent of people who started doctoral studies in Sweden in 2022 were foreigners, rising to 63 percent in natural sciences, the government said as it announced the inquiry on Monday.

“Sweden is a strong research and innovation nation, and international collaborations are central to us being able to maintain this. A crucial part of that is to pave the way for foreign researchers to come to Sweden and share their knowledge,” said Education Minister Mats Persson in a statement.

The inquiry is supposed to analyse whether Sweden’s migration rules are fit for the purpose of attracting and retaining foreign researchers and propose measures to make it easier for them to stay, amid concerns that too many talents leave the country after finishing their studies.

Before the summer of 2021, doctoral students were eligible for permanent residency if they had lived in Sweden with a permit for doctoral studies for four out of seven years, but no mention was made about whether or not the government might consider bringing it back.

The inquiry will also suggest ways of clamping down on foreigners who abuse the system. In a report in 2022, the Migration Agency found that a large number of people use their student permit as an easier way of moving to Sweden to work, instead of applying for a work permit.

“This assignment is an important step in the work to facilitate and improve the conditions for foreign doctoral students and researchers in Sweden,” said Migration Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard. “It is also important that residence permits for studies are only granted to people who intend to study in Sweden, and not to people who intend to use the system for other purposes.”

The inquiry has until December 9th to present its proposals.

Member comments

  1. To retain (good) foreign researchers in Sweden, the universities will need to address a fair amount of (salary and promotion) discrimination. When I arrived in Sweden with more experience, articles, grants won and teaching experience than most of the senior lecturers, I was offered a lower salary and denied the docent title. There are so many stories like this and I would say that overall foreign scholars are mostly treated like a “lower class” at Swedish universities.

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For members

WORK PERMITS

Business leaders: Work permit threshold ‘has no place in Swedish labour model’

Sweden's main business group has attacked a proposal to exempt some jobs from a new minimum salary for work permits, saying it is "unacceptable" political interference in the labour model and risks seriously affecting national competitiveness.

Published: 25 April 2024 17:37 CEST
Updated: 26 April 2024 06:11 CEST
Business leaders: Work permit threshold 'has no place in Swedish labour model'

The Confederation of Swedish Enterprise said in its response to the government’s consultation, submitted on Thursday afternoon, that it not only opposed the proposal to raise the minimum salary for a work permit to Sweden’s median salary (currently 34,200 kronor a month), but also opposed plans to exempt some professions from the higher threshold. 

“To place barriers in the way of talent recruitment by bringing in a highly political salary threshold in combination with labour market testing is going to worsen the conditions for Swedish enterprise in both the short and the long term, and risks leading to increased fraud and abuse,” the employer’s group said.   

The group, which represents businesses across most of Sweden’s industries, has been critical of the plans to further raise the salary threshold for work permits from the start, with the organisation’s deputy director general, Karin Johansson, telling The Local this week that more than half of those affected by the higher threshold would be skilled graduate recruits Swedish businesses sorely need.   

But the fact that it has not only rejected the higher salary threshold, but also the proposed system of exemptions, will nonetheless come as a blow to Sweden’s government, and particular the Moderate Party led by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson, which has long claimed to be the party of business. 

The confederation complained that the model proposed in the conclusions of the government inquiry published in February would give the government and political parties a powerful new role in setting salary conditions, undermining the country’s treasured system of collective bargaining. 

The proposal for the higher salary threshold, was, the confederation argued, “wrong in principle” and did “not belong in the Swedish labour market”. 

“That the state should decide on the minimum salary for certain foreign employees is an unacceptable interference in the Swedish collective bargaining model, where the parties [unions and employers] weigh up various needs and interested in negotiations,” it wrote. 

In addition, the confederation argued that the proposed system where the Sweden Public Employment Service and the Migration Agency draw up a list of exempted jobs, which would then be vetted by the government, signified the return of the old system of labour market testing which was abolished in 2008.

“The government agency-based labour market testing was scrapped because of it ineffectiveness, and because it was unreasonable that government agencies were given influence over company recruitment,” the confederation wrote. 

“The system meant long handling times, arbitrariness, uncertainty for employers and employees, as well as an indirect union veto,” it added. “Nothing suggests it will work better this time.” 

For a start, it said, the Public Employment Service’s list of professions was inexact and outdated, with only 179 professions listed, compared to 430 monitored by Statistics Sweden. This was particularly the case for new skilled roles within industries like battery manufacturing. 

“New professions or smaller professions are not caught up by the classification system, which among other things is going to make it harder to recruit in sectors which are important for the green industrial transition,” the confederation warned. 

Rather than implement the proposals outlined in the inquiry’s conclusions, it concluded, the government should instead begin work on a new national strategy for international recruitment. 

“Sweden instead needs a national strategy aimed at creating better conditions for Swedish businesses to be able to attract, recruit and retain international competence.”

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