Comment by mrmekon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrmekon | Hacker News Reader

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It's easier to get it wrong than you might think. Sweden doesn't publish a specific "rules for work visas" document. That website is it, and it is not all inclusive. The only way to know all the rules of the visa are to read the actual laws (in Swedish, and in Swedish "legalese", so good luck to foreigners... the people who would need to know), and to read all of the relevant case law around it. On your first days in a country, you probably aren't perusing the rulings of their high courts.

In this guy's case, there is very relevant case law. Before March 2015 Migrationsverket applied the rules based on the average of your work visa period, 2 years. They would take your last 2 year's salary, divide by 24, and see if it's over 13,000 kr per month. After March 2015, following new case law, they started looking at each month individually and deporting if any specific month violated the rules.

Depending on when he did this, it is possible that if he asked a migration attorney for guidance they would have approved, and they would have been correct. The rules retroactively changed that year. It still would be just as likely to make the wrong decision after the court ruling, since migration court rulings aren't a particularly big topic of conversation for most people. Nobody really learned about it until deportations started skyrocketing in 2016.

I wrote a bit about the topic here: http://dontdeportthedog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/Failu...

There is also a pretty visible "Contact us" link with phone numbers and email addresses: https://www.migrationsverket.se/English/Contact-us.html So I can not feel sorry for him because he should have known. Had he been given incorrect information, it would have been a different matter. I also believe that the Swedish rules for work permits for immigrants are among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world. But you know more than me about that.

Hah, I just noticed that you consult to a tjänstepension company!

My experience with MV on the phone is that they won't answer any specific questions about the rules. According to some migration attorneys I spoke with, many of the rules are undefined and they make them up as they go. Did you see the one about the guy who was deported for not taking _unpaid_ vacation? Try to find _that_ requirement on lagen.nu ;)

Everywhere I've worked and everywhere I've interviewed with in the last 2 years has had employees get deported. In all cases, they (the companies) claim that the information that they got from the big HR consultancies and from Migrationsverket was faulty, and they're paying the price now. I'm not saying that it's okay to break the rules, but I will say that if breaking them accidentally is so common, something is wrong with the system.

Every job offer I've ever received in Sweden (5) has been illegal on the first pass, violating various requirements of work visas. Violations are typically things like tjänstepension not starting until after the 6 month trial period. The most common is that the job ad was only posted on LinkedIn and Indeed, but not on Arbetsförmedlingen.

Two of my friends got hit because their employer insurance plans didn't become "active" until their second day at work. You know, those plans that your employer takes out on your behalf and you can't even see if they exist, let alone when they started? So it goes.

In 2014 I would have agreed strongly with "among the simplest, most transparent and least arbitrary in the world", but in 2018 I would add the caveat "but worse than most of Europe."

tjänstepension - is that some kind of social security?

Yes, it's an employer-paid pension that is very similar to the U.S. 401(K). Depending on how you slice it, Swedish pensions are divided into 3 or 4 layers:

1) Income pension - equivalent to U.S. social security. Taken out of everyone's taxes, and you have no control over it.

2) Premium pension - it's considered part of Income pension (1), but when you earn above some amount it goes into this bucket and you can tell the government a bit about how you want it to be invested.

3) Occupational pension (tjänstepension) - An "optional" employer-paid pension that you have some direct control over. Depending on the management company, you can either choose between a few fixed investment schemes, or you can have full control over it and invest in stocks/mutual funds. It is "optional", but mandated by the unions, so not really optional.

4) Private pension - your own personal account, like an IRA

There were a bunch of deportations over tjänstepension problems. Companies that were not in unions paid employees that were not in unions and didn't offer the same tjänstepension as the union agreement. Migrationsverket decided (also in 2015) that the exact terms of the union agreements are required for all non-EU citizens, even if they aren't involved with the unions. (If you are Swedish or from the EU, there is no legal requirement.)

I got in trouble because the union requires a 4.5% tjänstepension contribution from your employer. My employer paid 8% to mine, but it was structured in a different way... which we later found out was unacceptable.

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