Sweden Ranks 5th in Europe for Wasting Qualified Foreign Talent

A new study by Lighthouse Reports, working with the Financial Times, El País, and Unbias the News, shows a big problem: many European countries are not giving good job opportunities to highly educated migrants. This failure hurts both the workers and the economies.

Based on data from the EU’s labor force survey from 2017 to 2022, the study shows that almost half of migrants with degrees are working in jobs they are overqualified for. For native workers, this number is less than a third.

Even though there is a high demand for skilled migrant workers, migrants with degrees are unemployed at almost twice the rate of natives.

This has a financial impact: on average, migrant graduates in Europe earn €2,000 less per year than native graduates with the same qualifications. Excluding the UK, Germany, and Nordic countries (due to unavailable data), this wage gap adds up to €10.7 billion in lost wages each year, which is 0.12% of these countries' combined GDP. Friedrich Poeschel from the Migration Policy Centre of the European University Institute explains, “The ‘brain waste’ of migrants is a real problem for European governments.”

The investigation also sheds light on the varying degrees of brain waste across Europe. Countries like Italy, Greece, Spain, and Sweden are among the worst performers in terms of utilizing the skills of highly educated migrants. Conversely, looking at Ireland, Portugal, and Sweden reveals how different host countries can present diverse opportunities and obstacles.

A big factor in brain waste is the migrant’s status. The study found that asylum seekers experience much higher levels of brain waste than other college-educated immigrants. This is a big problem in countries like Sweden, which has a large refugee population.

Sweden’s number of refugees has nearly doubled in the past ten years, with 265 refugees per 10,000 residents in 2022, compared to the EU average of 150. Despite having good naturalization rates and strong integration policies, Sweden still sees college-educated migrants facing triple the unemployment rates if they arrived for humanitarian reasons rather than economic ones. Many barriers contribute to this: many countries don’t let asylum seekers work until several months after they arrive, and proving their degrees can be hard for those fleeing unstable regions.

When safety and security are the main reasons for migrating, these individuals often have fewer skills that transfer easily to the new country, especially language skills. In Sweden, college-educated migrants with poor Swedish language skills are three times more likely to be unemployed compared to those with good language skills.

Also, stigma and racism make things worse.

Research by Nahikari Irastorza and Pieter Bevelander from Malm? University shows that the most disadvantaged migrant groups are usually those from Africa and the Middle East, many of whom come to Sweden as asylum seekers.

Without big changes, highly skilled migrants will continue to work in jobs that are very different from what they trained for.

Author's note: this article has been rewritten to reflect parts of an original article to focus mainly on the role that Sweden has in these results. The source is posted below.

Source: https://www.ft.com/content/58b9ade8-43b8-4b7a-8f77-d4129123fd07

Source (in Swedish): https://www.tn.se/arbetsmarknad/36911/sverige-i-eus-bottenliga-lyckas-inte-ge-hogutbildade-migranter-jobb/?hss_channel=lis-MJA0sflVjU