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WORK PERMITS

Swedish Migration Agency: Entrepreneur’s 35,000 kronor salary ‘too low’ for work permit

The Swedish Migration Agency rejected Hazem Ashour's work permit application, stating that his salary was too low compared to industry standards.

Published: 30 August 2024 15:32 CEST
Hazem
In an email to The Local, Ashour conveyed deep frustration with the lengthy and challenging work permit process he has faced. Photo and screenshot: Hazem Ashour

At 32, Hazem Ashour is a celebrated entrepreneur in Sweden, having been honoured in 2021 by King Carl XVI Gustaf for his contributions to the tech industry.

Ashour, originally from Egypt, co-founded Hemavi, a platform that helps exchange students find housing in Sweden, during his studies at Lund University in 2020.

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The company quickly grew, attracting tens of thousands of users and securing over ten million kronor in investments.

Yet, despite his successful track record, Ashour is now embroiled in a fight to remain in the country he has come to call home.

Hemavi: A successful business story

Hemavi was founded on October 15th, 2020, by Ashour and his business partner and has since become a respected player in the international relocation industry.

As Ashour told The Local after regional newspaper Sydsvenskan first reported his story, the company was created with the aim of transforming the experience for international students and young professionals moving across borders.

“We wanted to provide them with safe housing, friends with similar interests, and administrative support in their new country,” Ashour said.

The company’s journey began with a strong start.

In November 2020, just a month after its founding, Hemavi secured its first investment of 615,000 kronor.

By December of the same year, Ashour had signed his first employment agreement with Hemavi and submitted a work permit application to the Swedish Migration Agency, after taking on the role of CEO.

Hemavi’s growth accelerated in June 2021 when the company raised an additional 4,050,000 kronor.

This influx of capital allowed Hemavi to expand its team and begin the development of its core tech platform.

As the company scaled, Ashour’s salary was adjusted to 30,000 kronor, reflecting the increased demands of his role.

In November 2021, Ashour’s entrepreneurial efforts were recognised when he was awarded the HMK Kung Carl XVI Gustafs pris Årets Nybyggare (“settler of the year”), honouring him as one of southern Sweden’s top foreign entrepreneurs.

The year 2023 marked a significant turning point for Hemavi.

The company transitioned from offering free services to generating revenue, earning 890,000 kronor for the first time.

This success was bolstered by a new investment of 3,000,000 kronor in October 2023.

As Hemavi prepared to expand geographically, particularly with its planned launch in Copenhagen, Ashour’s salary was increased to 35,000 kronor in November 2023, then to 42,000 kronor in December 2023.

In 2024, the company continued to expand, successfully launching in Copenhagen and achieving a growth rate of 2.5 times year over year. Hemavi also secured a pilot programme with one of Japan’s largest real estate conglomerates, enabling it to list thousands of properties in Tokyo for expats, Ashour told The Local.

Hazem Ashour

Hazem Ashour, photographed in his office, in August 2024. Courtesy of: Hazem Ashour

At risk of deportation

The initial success convinced Ashour to stay in Sweden and apply for a work permit in late 2020. However, several years later, he finds himself at risk of deportation.

After nearly three years of waiting, the Swedish Migration Agency rejected his application in December 2023, citing that his salary as CEO was too low compared to industry standards.

This decision came at a time when Ashour had been unable to leave Sweden for almost three years due to the pending status of his application.

In November 2023, Ashour was earning 35,000 kronor per month – just below the agency’s benchmark of 40,000 kronor for CEOs. Sweden’s minimum salary threshold for work permits currently stands at 28,480 kronor, but salaries should also be in line with industry standards, meaning the threshold is higher for some professions.

Although he raised his salary to 42,000 kronor before the agency made its final decision, the increase wasn’t considered in its ruling.

Ashour, who says he had deliberately taken a lower salary to reinvest in his company, appealed the decision – with success. His appeal led to the annulment of the initial ruling, and the Swedish Migration Agency is now re-examining his case.

“The court has annulled the Migration Agency’s decision that my salary is insufficient and referred the case back to the Migration Agency for further processing. The court has ruled that I have presented evidence in the form of, among other things, employment contracts, pay slips, and transaction receipts,” Ashour said.

“The documents show that I have received the stated salary of 42,000 kronor since December 2023,” he added.

Despite this, Ashour noted, “the Migration Agency ignored this evidence in their decision and our first and second appeal.”

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Ashour’s case also involved a disputed claim by the Migration Agency, which stated that they had sent him a letter on August 31st, 2023, informing him that the lowest market salary for his profession was 39,000 kronor and offering him an opportunity to respond

However, Ashour clarified, “I informed them in my appeal that this is incorrect, and I have never received such a letter.”

The Migration Court found that case documents showed returned envelopes received by the Migration Agency on September 21st, 2023, contradicting their claim that the letter had been successfully sent.

A ‘super frustrating’ process

Ashour has been unable to travel to meet with international investors or visit his family for nearly four years, leaving him in limbo.

The prolonged process has significantly affected his personal and professional life.

In an email to The Local, Ashour conveyed deep frustration with the lengthy and challenging work permit process he has faced.

“Of course, it’s super frustrating! I don’t think words can properly describe how this whole process feels,” he said, highlighting the emotional toll it has taken on him.

“It took me, an entrepreneur recognised by the king and running a tech company valued at 40 million kroner, over three years, countless unanswered phone calls and emails to the Migration Agency, and an appeal to the migration court just to get my salary approved – something that should have been straightforward from the start.

“I moved to Sweden almost six years ago, completed my studies, and built a company that employs people, pays taxes, and provides a service that people appreciate. Yet, in return, I’m being treated like a criminal. It just doesn’t feel right!” he said, adding that his personal life has largely influenced his decision to stay in Sweden.

“If I didn’t have a girlfriend here, I would have probably moved the company somewhere else by now,” Ashour said.

Despite the recent victory in court, he remains concerned.

“It’s worth mentioning that this is not the end of it. The Migration Court sent the case back to the Migration Agency to review the rest of the components of my employment conditions, such as the insurance, vacation days, and others,” he said.

“Let’s hope it doesn’t take the Migration Agency another three years to do that.”

Proposed changes to Sweden’s immigration policies

As Ashour awaits the outcome of his case, Sweden is also reviewing its broader immigration policies.

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Proposed changes include a wage requirement for work permits that matches 100 percent of the median wage in Sweden.

However, the proposals also suggest that certain occupations might be exempt from these new rules, with any changes expected to take effect in June 2025.

PODCAST: 

Listen to our podcast panelists speak about Hazem Ashour’s case

Follow Sweden in Focus wherever you listen to podcasts. 

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INDIANS IN SWEDEN

Interview: Indians leaving Sweden only ‘a temporary fluctuation’

The engineering services company Siri AB has been recruiting high-skilled Indian workers to Sweden from its office in Gothenburg for years. They told The Local that talk of an Indian 'exodus' from Sweden is exaggerated.

Published: 16 September 2024 10:09 CEST
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.”

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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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