Migrants in the Swedish region of Skåne have allegedly been offered to purchase fake jobs contracts in order to legally obtain a residency permit to live in the country.
Obtaining a valid employment contract is one of the legal avenues to gaining a residency permit in Sweden and an investigation by Swedish media has claimed that fake jobs contracts are being sold to migrants to help them obtain residency.
Some of the fake jobs contracts cost up to 400,000 Swedish kronor (£31,625/$37,583), according to a migrant woman interviewed by the Swedish broadcaster SVT.
“I met a family who offered me a job as a personal assistant to their children, but they wanted me to pay 400,000 [Swedish kronor] to be able to get the job,” the migrant woman told the broadcaster.
“I would have paid if I could afford it,” the woman, who has lived in Sweden for eight years and been denied a residency permit, said. She added that she would have paid the sum even if it was illegal saying, “I just want to protect myself and feel safe.”
The alleged fraud comes despite Sweden being already perfectly liberal with residency permits in the recent past, granting 1.2 million permits from 2010 to 2020, with 300,000 being granted to economic migrants, while family reunification and asylum contributed around 650,000 residency permits.
Similar fraudulent schemes to gain residency for migrants have been seen elsewhere in Europe, including sham marriages of migrants to those with local citizenship.
In 2019, a German migrant taxi NGO advocated the practice, calling on Germans to marry migrants in order to prevent them from being deported. “You’re not married yet? Maybe you could fall in love with someone who doesn’t have the right to stay here? Could happen, right? Stay open,” the group said.
That same year, a civil servant in France was accused of arranging at least a dozen sham marriages in order to help migrants gain French residency. The woman allegedly even shopped around different municipalities if she met resistance from local officials to the marriages.