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Migration Minister promises more service in labor immigration, but more is needed

Skills supply Education and training

In a letter to IT&Telecom companies, the Minister of Migration flags that labor immigration will be facilitated, among other things by giving the Migration Agency a mission to become more service-oriented. The Minister also points to proposals from the inquiry that employers should be able to correct mistakes. We in the IT industry say this is the right way forward, but more is needed.

The Minister for Migration, Morgan Johansson, has responded to the appeal on labor immigration that a large number of actors, headed by IT&Telecom companies, submitted on 9 November last year (also published on DN Debatt).

The key messages we take from the Minister's letter response are as follows:

  • The Government believes that a well-functioning supply of skills is important for Swedish companies and for Sweden as a nation of knowledge.
  • It is important that the rules are predictable and clear. However, it can be difficult to draw the line between minor mistakes and deliberate cheating. It should be easy to get it right.
  • The Government has commissioned the Swedish Migration Agency to draw up an action plan for how the processing of both new cases and extension cases concerning work permits can be significantly shortened.
  • The Swedish Migration Agency has also been tasked with developing a strategy for more appropriate accessibility and service.
  • The Government has initiated work to give the Swedish Migration Agency direct access to information held by the Swedish Tax Agency and others.
  • The Minister also highlights the recently presented proposals from the report Strengthening the position of labor migrants in the labor market (SOU 2016:91) that employers should be given the opportunity to correct deficiencies in the conditions before an extension application is submitted.

All of these points are extremely important, and we hope and expect that the Migration Agency and other responsible authorities will really take on board and implement the points made by the Minister.

With regard to the last point above, which refers to the recently presented report, we believe that the report's proposals are insufficient. Like the other signatories to the petition, the IT&Telecom companies will return with detailed responses in their consultation response, but we would like to raise a few objections here and now:

  • The report does not change the very strict requirement that work permits must be withdrawn in the event of any form of deviation from the permitted conditions, which prevents an overall assessment based on proportionality and reasonableness. The starting point of the inquiry has been to strengthen the position of the migrant worker, but as long as this rule*) exists, the migrant worker is in a very vulnerable situation, with the risk of deportation even in the event of unintentional and trivial mistakes by the employer.
  • It is good that the possibility of correcting mistakes is being introduced, but it should not be limited to only those cases where the employer himself discovers this and reports it. The Minister himself suggests that the rules are not easy to follow, and then a reasonable starting point should be that the employer is given the opportunity to correct even when the Migration Agency points it out - again, it is actually about the migrant worker's situation, not just the employer's.
  • Introducing criminal liability for other than very obvious infringements (such as bogus employment) creates significant uncertainty about the whole application of the regulation.

Thank you, Minister, for your reply.

*) Aliens Act Chapter 7 §7: "work permit shall be revoked...