You should tell your friends to look into what the EU can do for them. There have been a couple of - ah - interesting rulings in this respect. The essence of what the Danish newsies have reported is that the European Court has ruled that living and working legally in another country for any lenght of time makes residency and work permits federal jurisdiction... and that the free movement of labour means that if you're legal in one country and your residency is a matter of federal jurisdiction, you're legal all over the EU (or possibly the Schengen). Punkt, aus, schluss.

So a three-week trip to the Netherlands might be the solution to your friends' problem...

This has caused considerable consternation among certain unsavoury Danish politicians, because you're right, we do have rather a lot of couples living in Malmö (although not all of them for that reason - the undervalued SKK makes having an income in DKK and expenses in SKK a financially attractive proposition in its own right. Plus, houses are cheaper in Sweden because they haven't had a neolib government to Ponzify them for quite as long).

- Jake

640 kiloton should be enough for anybody