Right now, there are over 90,000 cases on the authority’s desk, which roughly 200 employees at the citizenship examination in Norrköping and Gothenburg have to handle.
The fact that the pressure is particularly great right now is due to two things:
– Those who received residence permits, especially during 2014-2016, have been in Sweden for so long now that they meet the requirements to apply for Swedish citizenship.
In addition, there is a section in the Administrative Law which gives an applicant the right to request that his case be decided after six months. Those who rushed to apply after the Tidö Agreement was presented have therefore waited long enough, and the Migration Agency must begin to absorb the increased influx from last autumn.
A quarter of a million applications are pending
– In the last three years, we have handled and settled 250,000 applications and the next three years look exactly the same. We have to process and decide about a quarter of a million new applications.
This summer, the government is expected to present the directives for the new stricter requirements. Mats Rosenqvist emphasizes that he does not get involved or have opinions on the political decisions, but focuses on how it can affect the authority’s work:
– The more demands or changes that mean that we have to take more processing measures, the more time it takes in each case. Since we are talking about such huge volumes, it will take quite a lot of time.
The time agreement affects the processing
In particular, the proposal that applicants must show that they are self-sufficient risks prolonging the process at the Swedish Migration Agency.
But Mats Rosenqvist believes that stricter requirements can also reduce the workload:
– If there are fewer people who can apply for Swedish citizenship, there will be less to work with in the citizenship test.
– At the same time, you can see that citizenship will be even more valuable in the future, then I can imagine that it is important for many to get their application settled.