The Swedish Employment Service has warned that migrant unemployment rates are set to dramatically increase to the worst levels since the 1990s in a new report.
The agency stated that as the trend of overall unemployment in Sweden continues to grow, structural unemployment will increase and that migrants will be especially likely to be jobless, Sydsvenskan reports.
“The Employment Service believes that those born abroad with the highest level of upper secondary education will suffer a sharp rise in unemployment and long-term unemployment in the coming years,” the agency said.
“The group that is most severely affected is foreign-born women who do not have upper secondary education,” it added.
The report comes just a month after Swedish bank Handelsbanken predicted that the country’s economy would remain sluggish for the rest of the year and that overall unemployment numbers could reach as high as 7.2 per cent this year and 7.4 per cent in 2023.
The agency also demanded 800 million Swedish krona (£63,680,071/$82,220,880) in added cash from 2021 to 2023 to cope with added administrative costs.
Migrant unemployment rates have been far higher than rates fior native Swedes rates for years, with a 2018 report revealing that while native unemployment was just 3.6 per cent that year the migrant rate was 19.9 per cent.
Migrants also make up the majority of those who sign up with the Employment Service, according to another 2018 report, which noted that six in ten people registered with the agency are born overseas.
The Employment Service has several programmes designed to get migrants into work including the use of government-subsidised jobs — and figures released in early February showed that just 6.1 per cent of newly-arrived migrants were able to find work not subsidised by the government after 90 days in an Employment Service programme.
In total, just 31 per cent of migrants in the programme were able to get any sort of job at all.
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