The Eye of the Beholder: Narrating Crisis in the Ongoing Swedish Labor Migration Policy Debate

Abstract

In 2008, the four party center-right Swedish government, with the support of the Green Party, enacted legislation making it substantially easier for non- European Union citizens (so-called third-country nationals (TCN) to live and work in Sweden. Casting aside a decades-old policy in which trade unions and labor market authorities played a crucial role in regulating the foreign labor tap, the reformed policy has made employment offers the key criterion in determining whether a work permit is granted. The resulting policy is now considered to be among the most open for OECD countries (OECD 2011). However, such a policy shift was far from uncontroversial. Indeed, the five parties in support of liberal labor migration faced substantial opposition from Social Democrats (SAP), the Left Party, and trade unions (Berg and Spehar 2013; Bucken-Knapp 2009; Hinnfors, Spehar, and Bucken-Knapp 2012; Spehar, Bucken-Knapp, and Hinnfors 2013), all of whom expressed fears that a permit-granting system based largely on employment offers would undermine core features of the Swedish labor market. Five years on, nearly 60,000 TCNs have been granted work permits for employment across sectors of the Swedish labor market (Swedish Migration Board 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012). While the initial numbers of new labor migrants were lower than forecast by the Swedish Migration Board (Goteborgs-Posten 2009), this has not resulted in the issue fading from public debate. Indeed, largely reflecting persistent media coverage of instances where TCN labor migrants have suffered at the hands of unscrupulous employers, the ongoing debate over Sweden’s liberal labor migration policy has only continued to gather steam and remains a regular feature on the op-ed pages of the leading national and regional daily newspapers.