When The Local reported last month that Sweden was in the first six months of 2024 seeing net emigration of Indian citizens for the first time in that period since records began, the media in India sensationalised the story to such an extent that Nrusimha Kiran Pathakota, business strategy manager at Siri AB, had to fend off worried calls from home.
“It picked up quite a bit of steam in India, and then it also got merged with the other news, like the crime rate, and we started getting calls from some of our friends and relatives. Is everything fine in Sweden?” he told The Local. “The news did spread across the spectrum, and it got picked up by a lot of vernacular news channels. I could see at least 10 or 15 channels covering the story.”
But according to Pathakota and the company’s global business director Aditya Mylavarapu, while there have been some major layoffs at big companies that employ Indian software engineers, there’s no sign of an exodus of high-skilled Indians.
“I think these statistics definitely highlight a shift,” Mylavarapu said. “But from where we stand and what we see on the ground, we believe it is a temporary fluctuation rather than a long-term trend.”
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For a start, as The Local also reported, some of the Indian citizens registered as leaving Sweden in the first part of the year may have left earlier and then been included in this year’s statistics due to the Swedish Tax Agency’s checks on the population register.
But even those that have left, Mylavarapu said, were more likely to have done so because they lost residency permits than because of dissatisfaction with the country.
The redundancies announced last year by major employers, he explained, had taken an unusually long time to carry out, meaning many Indians’ permits had expired before they had a chance to get another job.
“I think 2023 saw the longest layoff period – not in terms of the number of layoffs, but in the time it took to start and end it,” he said. “Because of this extended time period, people who got laid off struggled to find another job,” he said.
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Siri AB and other potential employers, Mylavarapu explained, usually wait until a redundancy process is over before swooping in and trying to hire those who have been laid off.
“We tend to wait and watch until the layoff completes before we start planning the next step,” he explained. “And most other players would have been going with the same approach: let’s wait and watch until this whole thing comes to an end, and then we will start recruiting.”
But in early 2024, this approach backfired, as many work permit holders had not managed to find a job within the three-month window they are given under their work permits.
“Most work permit holders have only three months to find a job before they have to leave, so you could attribute some of these data shifts to that.”
No big changes to make Sweden less attractive
Erik Hult, Siri’s sales manager, said that the tightening of immigration policy under the current government and the higher salary threshold for a work permit, had had only a minimal impact on the attractiveness of Sweden for the Indians professionals the company hires.
“In our case, this has not affected us since we work with high-skilled competence, where the salary levels are higher,” he said.
Efforts to speed up work permit processing times for high-skilled workers were at the same time removing one of the barriers.
“I wouldn’t say that it has made Sweden more attractive, yet. But it makes it more competitive,” he said. “For us as a company it makes a difference in being able to provide talent to our customers at shorter lead time.”
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Mylavarapu said that Indians already living and working in Sweden didn’t feel less welcome as a result of the “paradigm shift” in migration policy.
“On the ground and in my social circles, I have not heard anything bad about Sweden that turned 180 degrees in the last few years,” he said. “In the last 13 odd years we’ve hired about 250 people, and only a handful of people – I can count them on one hand – have left to go back to India, and most of them went to take care of aging parents. Other than that, most have made a decision to settle down here.”
The gang crime issues that featured in the many of the reports on Indian TV had not, he added, changed the attitudes of high-skilled Indian workers.
“The reports about the crime rate in Sweden have had an impact on how Indians in India perceive Sweden, not Indians living in Sweden, because it has never affected them directly,” he said.
What did make a difference was the weak krona, however, with “very, very high inflation” obvious when buying groceries.
Innovation and quality of life the big advantage
But there are career opportunities available in Sweden that are hard to find elsewhere, at least outside of Silicon Valley, Pathakota said.
“Innovation in Sweden is very high, and that is probably the reason why most Indians look at Sweden. There are so many companies that are innovating here and that is quite an attraction.”
For Siri AB, the challenge over the past 13 years has been to make highly-skilled Indians see Sweden as a good place to move to.
“For us, for a long time, the competition is not about attracting talent to Siri, but attracting talent to Sweden, and what Sweden has in its favour is the work-life balance and the easy ways of working. I read somewhere that India and Sweden are two countries of different sizes, but almost similar mentality and I can see that.”
Size of economy, spouse jobs and slow medical care
The biggest downside to Sweden as a place for Indians to work, he said, was the small size and concentration of the economy, which means employment tends to be less stable than in the US or Germany, with the few really big employers often hiring or enacting redundancy programmes at the same time.
“The fluctuations are way too steep and way too fast, while for a country like Germany, the ups and downs can be more easily managed. For a typical person, it is easy to find another job,” Pathakota said.
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The small size of the economy also poses a problem for Indian couples where there are two highly skilled workers, only one of which has been offered a job in Sweden.
“We’re talking about people who are engineering graduates, managers and medical specialists, or software engineers, and then generally, they tend to marry people who have the same skills, and sometimes it is a challenge to get a job for the spouse at a level equal to their skills.”
What could Sweden do to make itself more attractive?
Back in India, healthcare can be expensive but getting an appointment and scheduling an operation is fast compared to the long waits common in Sweden, something Mylavarapu said many Indians living in Sweden found frustrating.
“We have had a few employees over the past few years who ran into some medical emergencies, and once they are into the hospital, they have nothing but praise. They have not seen a system so accommodating and compassionate,” he said.
“But getting into the door has become more and more difficult to the extent that some people I know went back to India to get medical treatment. That is becoming a sensitive point. If there is something that government can do about that, I think it would be a big win.”
Pathakota, meanwhile, believes that the country should consider bringing in a different taxation system for people on short-term work permits, like the “30 percent ruling” in The Netherlands, or perhaps a tax rebate like the one Germany has been considering.
“The whole tax system in this part of the world – in Sweden and probably in Germany as well – is designed for life,” he said. “You get the real benefits as you age. As you get old, the country will take care of you.”
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This can be a problem for Indians who often intend to return to India before retirement, as on top of paying tax for an old age they probably won’t end up spending in the country, they often also send money back to India to support elderly relatives.
Whether or not Sweden’s government takes any new actions to attract high-skilled labour, Siri AB expects Indians to continue to come to the country, with the emigration in the first half of the year a temporary slump in a long-term upward trend.
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Coming from an Indian, I strongly disagree Sweden has to change anything for Indians or any country citizens for that matter but on the contrary india and Indians shoudl learn from here how zero corrupt and innovative, reasonable, responsible Sweden is.
Thank you again