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WORK PERMITS

Danish authority confirms new wage data for work permit applications

New wage statistics will be used from April 1st for assessment of work permit applications by the Danish Agency for International Recruitment and Integration (SIRI).

Published: 19 March 2024 14:58 CET
Danish authority confirms new wage data for work permit applications
Denmark updates wage data used for processing work permit applications on a quarterly basis. Photo by Luca Bravo on Unsplash

When assessing applications for work permits under programmes including the Pay Limit Scheme, the Fast Track Scheme and the Positive List, the Danish Agency for International Recruitment and Integration (SIRI), which is responsible for processing work permits, uses income statistics to decide whether a job that has been offered is within the Danish standards for salary.

The statistics, which are provided by the Confederation of Danish Employers (Dansk Arbejdsgiverforening, DA) will be updated on April 1st, SIRI said in a statement on Monday.

The statistics base used by the agency is updated regularly.

READ ALSO: Denmark allows some foreigners to work ‘for short periods’ without permits 

The new income statistics contains information from fourth quarter of 2023. A further quarterly update is due to take effect from July 1st, SIRI said in the statement.

For people who have applied or are applying for a Danish work permit, this means that applications submitted from April 1st onwards will be assessed based on income statistics for the fourth quarter of 2023. Applications submitted between January 1st and March 31st will be assessed based on income statistics from the third quarter of 2023.

Danish work permit rules require salary and other employment conditions offered to the foreign employee to be equivalent to those on the Danish labour market. This applies for first-time applications as well as for extensions.

For example, the Pay Limit scheme allows work permits to be granted to applicants who have been offered a salary by a Danish employer which is at or above the government-set minimum amount.

However, when assessing applications, SIRI must also assess whether the salary offered is “realistic” for the role being offered, to comply with rules intended to guard against abuse of the work permit system.

READ ALSO: Restaurant manager refused Danish work permit as salary deemed too high to be believable

According to SIRI’s website, the agency will normally deem the salary to be within normal Danish standards if the employer, or the employment contract, is covered by a collective bargaining agreement.

In other cases, it may more closely assess the salary that has been offered.

If SIRI finds that the salary does not appear to be at a usual level for the given role, it may ask the employer about the salary based on DA’s statistics.

It may also ask another body, the Regional Labour Market Councils (De Regionale Arbejdsmarkedsråd) for a second opinion.

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INTERVIEW

‘A noticeable change’: What Denmark’s plans to change family reunion rules mean

Olivia Scott, chair of the campaign group Marriage Without Borders, tells The Local that while the Danish government's plans to make it easier to bring a foreign spouse to the country are welcome, they don't go nearly far enough.

Published: 3 May 2024 17:12 CEST
'A noticeable change': What Denmark's plans to change family reunion rules mean

Scott, a Dane who is married to an American, told The Local that her organisation, Ægteskab Uden Grænser, had mixed views about the bill, which will give Danish international executives the same rights to bring a foreign wife to Denmark as foreign executives, halve the bank guarantee or bankgaranti those bringing a spouse to Denmark have to leave for their local municipality, and reduce language requirements for the Danish partner. 

“For some it will make a noticeable change,” she said of the bank guarantee change, “because it is going from being around 114,000 kroner to 57,000 kroner which is much more digestible, especially for younger people, so of course that’s welcome. But we just don’t think it should be there at all.”

As municipalities almost never draw funds from the deposits to support spouses who have come to Denmark, the system, she said, was actually costing them more in adminstration fees than they were gaining from it. “So it ends up becoming a cost for our municipalities and for our government, instead of serving the purpose it’s supposed to serve.” 

READ ALSO: What’s in the new law on bringing a foreign spouse to Denmark?

As for the plan to allow Danish executives returning to Denmark for work to bring a foreign wife and family under the same rules as apply to foreign executives, she said this followed a pattern in Denmark where only so called mønsterborgere, or “outstanding citizens” were welcome to bring spouses to the country. 

“Yes, there are some people that will benefit from this, and we’re always happy when there are regulations that change for the better,” she said. “But this is still just a small group.” 

Olivia Scott is chair of Marriage without Fronteirs. Photo: private

She said the attention being given to Danish executives in the bill simply served to emphasise the gap in the way regular Danes and “highly educated Danes with a lot of money” are seen by the government. 

“That this regulation is making it easier for highly educated individuals with good jobs, is, again, confirming this premise that it is only ‘outstanding citizens’ that we feel should be able to enjoy the ability to be family unified,” she said. 

The third part of the new law, which alters the language requirements for the Danish partner was, she said, welcome, as many Danes who wanted to bring a spouse to Denmark were being foreced to take a Danish exam to prove their ability to speak their own native language.  

“There has been a group of elderly gentleman that simply do not have the physical documentation that they passed their ninth grade. It’s called the afgangseksamen. It’s a physical document that they have lost over the last couple of decades, and so they have had to go and take a Danish test to certify their level of Danish, which is ridiculous because they’re Danish and they’ve lived and studying here their whole life.”

As for the final bit of the new bill, which will block spousal reunions if either the Dane or their partner has been charged or is under prosecution for a crime, Scott said Marriage without Borders supported the idea that someone who has been sentenced for comitting a hard crime is limited in their ability to get family reunification.

“But maybe there should be consideration paid to how long ago the crime was committed,” she said. 

In addition, she said, there was little evidence that foreign spouses tended to commit crimes, so the change would have little impact. 

“If you go and you look at statistics on foreign spouses family reunified with Danish citizens, the crime rate is lower in this specific group than it is among regular ethnic Danes.” 

Finally, she said that even if the bill represented a step forward, her organisation intended to keep pushing for additional relaxations of Denmark’s draconian family reunification rules. 

“Obviously, we hope that it’s going to go further, but we as an organisation are not going to be happy until the day when the rules for family reunion according to Danish law are equalised with those under EU law,” she said. “We cannot accept that the under EU law, you can come to the country as long as you can financially support yourself, and you can obtain permanent residency in five years, whereas for Danish laws, you are locked-into sometimes decades of struggles for no reason.” 

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