Swedish PM seeks to cut inflow of foreign workers

Sweden's prime minister wants to curb labour migration to the Scandinavian country to provide more jobs for its own unemployed, including refugees accepted in recent years.

Published: 24 February 2017 18:01 CET

Swedish PM seeks to cut inflow of foreign workers

Swedish prime minister Stefan Löfven. Photo: Pontus Lundahl/TT

“Jobs that require little or no education will first be filled by the unemployed who are already in our country,” Social Democratic leader Stefan Löfven told reporters in Stockholm.

A country of almost ten million people, Sweden took in 244,000 asylum seekers in 2014 and 2015, the highest number per capita in Europe. Figures have since dropped to fewer than 30,000 in 2016, following tighter borders and asylum rules.

“It's unreasonable for us to have a labour migration that consists of dishwashers (and) restaurant employees when we have capable people who have arrived here as refugees,” Löfven added.

“The first thing we will do is to emphasize that everyone who can work will work,” the 59-year-old leader said as he presented the Social Democrats' programme for its party congress in April when it will lay the foundations for its 2018 election campaign.

Löfven said there were 100,000 jobs available in Sweden and some 300,000 jobless workers.

Around four percent of people in Sweden aged 15-29 were either unemployed or not attending school in 2016, according to Statistics Sweden.

The country granted work permits to more than 12,000 people from countries outside the EU in 2016.

This figure includes around 4,000 unskilled labourers such as cleaners, chefs, waiters and waitresses and mechanics, according to the Swedish migration board.

The Social Democrats run a minority government with the Green Party, which opposes the plan, making it unlikely for Sweden to restrict labour migration before the September 2018 election.

“If the Greens choose to dig their heels in and fight then there'll be a government crisis,” Jonas Hinnfors, a political science professor at the University of Gothenburg, told AFP.

“It's more likely that this will be a (Social Democratic) election promise instead of forcing the Greens to agree,” he said.

The Social Democrats have traditionally had a large working class voter base, and Löfven's comments were seen as an attempt to win over voters fleeing to the anti-immigration far-right Sweden Democrats.

According to a poll conducted between January 23rd and February 19th by public broadcaster SVT, the Sweden Democrats were the third-largest party behind the Social Democrats and the opposition conservative Moderates.

Article written by AFP

With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced on Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.