Current project

National Labor Immigration Policies in Selected Countries

Many European countries are facing growing labor shortages and increasingly look to third countries to fill workforce gaps. In this project, Fafo maps and compares labor immigration policies across eleven EU/EEA countries.

The project examines how countries design and implement policies to attract workers from outside the EU/EEA. The study covers the Nordic countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Iceland) as well as the Netherlands, Austria, Belgium, Germany, Ireland, Italy and Poland.

Each country is analyzed along four indicators:

overarching objectives and strategies
legislation and policy instruments
administration and case processing
outcomes.

The project combines document analysis, a scoping review of existing research, qualitative expert interviews and the compilation of statistics from Eurostat and national sources. A cross-cutting perspective is the distinction between short-term and long-term labor needs and between high-skilled and low-skilled recruitment.

The mapping covers areas such as work permit frameworks, bilateral agreements with third countries, the role of public authorities in promotion and recruitment, and the organization of immigration administration.

The project is funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Labor and Social Inclusion. The final report will be published at the turn of 2026/2027.