Lithuania’s Interior Ministry has proposed amendments to the Law on the Legal Status of Aliens, aimed at tightening the existing requirements for incoming foreign workers and businesses inviting them.
“While addressing labour shortages and humanitarian problems, we must not overlook threats to national security and prevent the abuse of migration procedures,” Interior Minister Agnė Bilotaitė told a press conference on Wednesday.
The amendments propose obliging employers to employ foreigners on a full-time basis and to reinstate the requirement for employers to provide information on foreigners’ qualifications and experience.
Under the proposal, only foreigners with a residence permit would be allowed to work in Lithuania, and the possibility of working in the country following the arrival under a visa-free regime or on a Schengen visa would be scrapped.
It is also proposed to limit the number of employers a foreigner can work for to a maximum of three.
“We see abuse cases where a foreigner arrives and works for ten or more employers. We understand that this is not very realistic, which is why we are proposing to limit the number,” Bilotaitė said.
Moreover, if a foreigner fails to submit tax returns, although they are obliged to do so by Lithuanian legislation, they might be refused a temporary residence permit in Lithuania or lose the existing one.
The proposed amendments will soon be submitted to the government, and if approved by ministers, they will be submitted to the Seimas during its spring session.
Figures from the Interior Ministry show that the number of foreigners living in Lithuania exceeded 200,000 for the first time in the country’s history last year.
In 2023, 16,000 decisions were made to ban the entry of foreign nationals into Lithuania due to threats to national security, and 244 such decisions have been made so far this year.
The number of foreign workers coming to Lithuania, mostly from Belarus, increased by 65 percent to 142,000 in 2023, the Employment Service said on Wednesday, citing employers’ reports.
At the beginning of this year, the majority of foreigners working in Lithuania were third-country nationals and their number stood at 131,400, or 65.5 percent more than a year ago, while the number of EU citizens working in Lithuania stood at 10,000, a 66.7 percent increase.
At the beginning of this year, the biggest number of newcomers came from Belarus – 47,700 people, or almost 1.6 times more than at the same time last year. The number of Ukrainians increased by 37 percent to 44,800, the number of Uzbek nationals jumped by 3.7 times to 6,600, and the number of Kyrgyz nationals rose 2.2 times to 5,600.
The biggest numbers of EU nationals working in Lithuania are from Romania (2,900), Latvia (2,400), Poland (1,500), Bulgaria (1,000), and Italy (300).
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