The International Citizen Day Lund event, on May 29th, was the first welcome day for international workers hosted by a city in Sweden, putting the country a few years behind both Finland, where Helsinki Welcome Day was launched in 2024 and Norway, which held Welcome to Oslo events in 2025.
Martina Åkerlund, communications manager for Lund's Cross-border Talent Bridge project, said that after exhibiting at International Citizen Day Copenhagen for several years, the organisers, Lund municipality and International Citizenship Hub Lund, had felt need for a similar event in Sweden.
"We think people in Skåne and Sweden need a place to connect and network, while people on the other side [of the Öresund] need a way to explore possibilities on the Swedish side," she told The Local on the sidelines of the event.
According to the organisers, over 200 people attended the event and 29 organisations exhibited, including The Local.
Suzanne Samuels, a global communications professional who has been based in Sweden for 30 years, said that the event had been a useful opportunity to network, both with businesses in the south of Sweden and and those in nearby Copenhagen.
"I've been here 30 years, but I only moved down to Malmö five years ago, so I'm not new to Sweden but I'm new to this region," she said. "What I thought was great about International Citizen Day was how they combined it with the folks in Copenhagen, so they brought both sides of the Strait together, which is really important because there are so many more jobs over there."
Sally Russell, who runs Helsingborg International Connections, a non-profit organisation that links international jobseekers with employers in Helsingborg, said that the event had been valuable.
"We had a great deal of interest in our activities in Helsingborg. A lot of internationals, including many students, were keen to know about job prospects in the city and to find out ways of expanding their personal and professional networks."
She argued that Stockholm and Gothenburg would "definitely benefit" if they decided to hold their own international citizen days.
"The concept of an international citizen day is very valuable to the regional international community. Not only does it showcase relevant organisations, institutions, and services, but it allows highly-qualified foreigners to feel seen and heard. It's a place to meet other internationals, exchange experiences, and find inspiration to navigate their way forward."
The Cross-border Talent Bridge, a three-year project funded by the EU’s Interreg programme, which runs until August 2027, launched the event as a pilot programme and is likely to hold a repeat event in 2027, after which its funding will end, leaving it up to other stakeholders to decide if they want to fund future events.
"This is just one of the activities," Åkerlund explained. "We have different welcome events in Copenhagen. We have had matchmaking events, and there have been a lot of mentoring programmes. Over the last year we will work more on the strategy and how to move on after the project."
The Talent Bridge project aims to attract skilled international workers to the Life Science and Tech sectors in the Greater Copenhagen region, and is led by the Lund municipality and Copenhagen Capacity, the business promotion agency in Copenhagen, with partners including the Ideon Science Park, Medicon Village, OpenTech, the City of Copenhagen, and Medicon Valley Alliance.
As well as Lund and Copenhagen, the nearby city of Malmö also had stand for its Onboarding Malmö project welcoming international workers, while the independent non-profit, Helsingborg International Connections, was there to help connect highly skilled foreigners with Helsingborg-based businesses.
Such was the level of interest that Åkerlund predicts that the event will be larger next year, with more major local employers taking part and perhaps even other municipalities.
From the point of view of Lund's municipal government, neighbouring cities like Helsingborg, Malmö and even Copenhagen are not seen as competitors fighting over the same international talent, but regional partners.
"International workers don't think about which city they're going to, they think more about which region they want to come and and live and work in, so we we're always sharing and trying to make something good for us all together."