COPY LINK

For members

WORK PERMITS

How you can get a faster decision from Sweden’s Migration Agency

If you've been waiting six months or more for a ruling from a Swedish agency there is something you can do to force the agency to take a decision. So is this worth doing in work permit, residency permit and citizenship cases?

Published: 26 July 2024 11:21 CEST
Updated: 4 August 2024 14:31 CEST

An office of the Migration Agency in Stockholm. Photo: Anders Wiklund/Scanpix

If you’ve been waiting a long time for your decision to come through you can, by law, submit what is called a “request to conclude”.

What is a ‘request to conclude’?

According to Sweden’s Administrative Procedure Act, which came into force in 2018, if an application you have made has not been decided “in the first instance” within six months at the latest, you can request in writing that the agency decide the case, using a process called a dröjsmålstalan, or “request for a case to be expedited”.

The agency then has four weeks to either take a decision or reject the request to conclude in a separate decision. You can then appeal this rejection to the relevant court or administrative authority.

You can only use the request to conclude mechanism once in each case.

How do you apply for a ‘request to conclude’ a Migration Agency case?

It’s very easy to fill in the form on the Migration Agency website, which only asks you to give your personal details, say whether your case concerns a work permit, residency permit, right of residency case, or ‘other’, and list any other people applying along with you. You then send the application by post to the Migration Agency address on the form.

Does it work?

A lot of people do seem to have success using the mechanism. The Migration Agency in section 9.1 of its annual report says that it is forced to to prioritise those who do this trick after a six month wait ahead of those who have spent longer in the queue. This is particularly the case for the ‘easy’ applications.

More or less everyone, though, has their initial request to conclude refused, seemingly automatically without the request ever being seen by a case officer.

Most them are then successful when they then appeal this refusal to the Migration court, with the Migration Agency stating on page 91 of its annual report that it lost 96 percent of such cases in 2021, 80 percent of such cases in 2022 and 77 percent of such cases in 2023.

As the Administrative Procedure Act states clearly that a decision should come within six months, the Migration Agency has in most cases a weak legal position.

Once your request is rejected you only a short time to appeal, so it is important to act quickly, even if the agency fails to inform you that your request has been rejected. It you have heard nothing and the four weeks are up, it’s important to chase your request so you can appeal before the deadline expires.

Even those who are rejected and don’t appeal sometimes get results, finding they are asked to submit their passport shortly afterwards.

However, this is not always the case, so it is essential to go ahead with the appeal anyway, even if your passport is requested.

What do people say?

The mechanism appears to be particularly popular among British people, with one member of the Brits in Sweden Facebook page saying that “pretty much everyone has used it”, but it is also used by other groups, such as Indians in Sweden.

One British woman said she had been informed about the rule by her case officer, and, although she was worried it might make a negative decision more likely, is glad she did so.

“I used it as it was offered and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I thought there was nothing to lose and it didn’t cost anything, only a bit of time!” she said.

She had her request for decision accepted, with the officer in four weeks getting back to her requesting that she send in two more forms, one documenting her relationship with an EU citizen, and another on her ability to support herself and pay for her accomodation.

“It’s a shame they didn’t advertise it more widely and I didn’t hear about it before. as I could have got a decision earlier on my residency application and then could have applied for permanent residency much sooner,” she said.

Another British woman said that she had decided to send in a request for a decision after she had been waiting for seven months for a decision on citizenship and her case officer told her to expect to wait as long as 36 months, despite being a simple case given that she had lived in Sweden lawfuly for five years, working throughout.

“I knew of the request to conclude option and used it. They waited the full month before responding and rejecting it, as was expected. But the next day also assigned me a case officer and asked for my passport,” she remembers. “I believe they did this so I wouldn’t appeal their rejection and get the courts support for them to hurry up and process it.”

Two months later, her citizenship was approved.

An Indian man said he had used the mechanism no fewer than three times, firstly when extending a work permit, then when applying for permanent residency for a dependent, and thirdly, when applying for citizenship.

In the first case, he said, the request had been accepted on a first attempt and his work permit extension — for which he had been waiting for more than a year — was granted 28 days later.

The second request, which he made after discovering his dependent had no case officer after seven months, was rejected. They appealed, the court ruled in their favour and their case officer gave a positive decision a month later.

Finally, in the citizenship case, the court ruled in his favour after the request was rejected, but 40 days later he is still waiting for a decision on the initial application.

Does sending in a request increase your chance of having an application rejected?

Anecdotally, it doesn’t appear to.

“It was a concern, yes,” the first British woman said, saying she had been told that sending in the form was “no reason to reject my application.”

“But this is Sweden and in my opinion, even simple or clear-cut things can be a gamble,” she added.

How does the mechanism affect handling times overall?

While the request-to-conclude mechanism might help applicants in individual cases, the Migration Agency complains that it has been making the problem of long processing times worse by creating an addition set of processes case officers need to handle, and also by affecting the agency’s ability to prioritise.

“The fact that many individuals request that their cases be decided is taking up a lot of resources and leading to processing times generally becoming longer, not least as many delay cases are appealed to the court,” Mikael Ribbenvik, the Migration Agency’s former Director General said when asking for the agency to be exempted from the system in April 2023.

Member comments

Anonymous - 26 July 2024 at 16:17 CEST

I use this mechanism which resulted in a lie given in the letter from the migration agency informing that my case was complex which was not the case ( chatting with a agency person via the migration agency chat function resulted in the actual truth that there is no case officer assigned to my case)

I ended up appealing the decision to the migration court which sided with me and forced the agency to complete doonest.

got my citizenship after 3 months then
Anonymous - 6 August 2024 at 08:34 CEST

I am British with post Brexit status, reside with Swedish partner, I work in Sweden. I applied for Citizenship, I demanded they conclude my case after 6 months, received denial 4 weeks later, I appealed, one working day later I receive court judgement stating it was an unreasonable delay, ordering them to resolve my case as soon as possible. The next day migration asked for my passport. Demanding they conclude case definitely seems to prompt action.

Become a Member to leave a comment.

Interview: Indians leaving Sweden only 'a temporary fluctuation'

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.”

READ ALSO:

Indians in Sweden hit back after ‘exodus’ stats go viral

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.

YOUR SWEDISH CAREER:

What laid-off foreigners get wrong about Sweden’s ‘three-month deadline’

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.”

READER INSIGHTS:

What Indians should consider before moving to Sweden

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.

READERS SUGGEST:

What can Sweden do to make life easier for ‘trailing spouses’?

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.”

EXPLAINED:

Which foreigners are eligible for Sweden’s ‘expert tax’ relief?

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.

SHOW COMMENTS

Url copied to clipboard!