OPINION: Why I’m tired of Swedes thinking it’s easy for…

Most Swedes assume that because Mandy Pipher’s husband is Swedish and they have a child together, her status in Sweden is secure. Not at all. She describes how she worries every day about making enough money to apply for permanent status in 2027, if it even …

These days I'm not sure what bothers me more: the byzantine modus operandi of the Swedish Migration Agency or the fact that most Swedes I encounter know nothing about the immigration policies and practices of their own government. I am Canadian, born and raised – by two born-and-raised Canadians, who were themselves children of born-and-raised Canadians. Not like such things should matter to how I am judged as a human being, but apparently ancestry-tracing is becoming a perfectly acceptable way of determining belonging in Sweden.

And this fact – that I was lucky enough to be born in another wealthy, western country, and am white – combined with the fact that I married a born-and-raised Swede and we have a little white child together, seems to matter when everyday Swedes make assumptions about my status here in Sweden. What they assume is that it was no problem for Per and I to move here together from Toronto; that now that we're here with our child, I 'automatically' get permanent residency or even citizenship; that the rules and operation of Swedish law are reasonable, sane, and humane – as Swedes are accustomed to thinking they are, for themselves.

But those of us who have immigrated to this country, under whatever circumstances and from whatever country, know differently. Per and I chose Canada as our first home together – partly because, at the time (2019), I had a better job in Toronto than he did in Stockholm, but also because we functionally couldn't choose Sweden: we would have had to live apart for at least a year, and he would have had to quadruple both his income and size of apartment before he'd be permitted to 'bring me over'.

That exceptionally absurd element of the system had changed by the time we had a child and, in 2022 we applied, from Toronto, for me to be allowed to move to Sweden with my husband and daughter. We'd decided that Umeå would be the best place for her to grow up – and, also, my husband wasn't happy in the big-city corporate hustle of Toronto; but every time I visited Umeå, I felt at home. After our application to Migrationsverket, we waited a year without hearing anything.

Meanwhile, approval of our application was dependant upon us proving our "intent to move to Sweden," in the form of signed housing leases or sales, jobs in Sweden, and so on. How we could be expected to plan – and pay for – two lives at the same time, a concrete one in Canada and a theoretical one in Sweden, with no time frame for a decision and a 1-year-old in the mix, seemed never to have been considered.

We eventually made it here, in 2024. My husband and our daughter are very happy in the north of Sweden – and, for the most part, so am I. There are of course the daily struggles of getting to know a new language, culture, and society; that's expected. What is truly difficult is the unstable legal and economic ground on which Swedish migration law forces all 'foreigners' in this country – including 'people like me', a highly-educated Canadian married to a Swede – to try to stand.

Four years after our first application to the Swedish Migration Agency, I am still only eligible for temporary resident permits. When I apply to renew my temporary permit – which cannot be done sooner than two months before the expiration date of the earlier permit – I am, as everyone who has had the pleasure of dealing with Migrationsverket knows, submitting myself to an indefinite waiting time limbo.

During this limbo, once one permit expires and before a decision on the new one is reached, I can't leave Sweden. Or, rather, I have no guarantee of being let back in on my return. So when everyday well-meaning Swedes – from my child's preschool teachers to my neighbours to corporate clients – ask me how often I travel back to Canada to visit family, what can I say but, 'I don't know; ask the Swedish government.' They look shocked – shocked that my husband I can't plan, in terms of time or money, for a big trans-Atlantic trip, except at the mercurial grace of Migrationsverket, and shocked that our four-year-old's opportunities to know her Canadian grandparents and cousins beyond an iPhone screen are so curtailed, by their own government's policies.

To get out of this insecure temporary residence cycle, with its associated cage on freedom of movement, I have been trying to plan my life around making enough money in the 2026 tax year to be eligible to apply for permanent residency status in 2027. But by then, will the category of permanent residency even exist? And if it does, will the income requirements be the same, or will I have spent years tying myself in knots to reach targets that jump ahead as soon as I reach them?

My husband has a good job here; it's enough to keep the three of us afloat, at least in a basic way. I certainly want to advance my career here, to work and earn my own money, to feel as established as I was in Toronto. But this takes time, even in the most open of job markets; and Sweden's is notoriously closed to those outside of its established networks. It is hard to explain to those who have never moved abroad (ahem *Johan Forssell* ahem), or found their ideal life partner in someone who holds a different passport, but there is a fundamental, bone-deep, if often low-level, sense of insecurity that comes from knowing, through experience, that your ability to be with and care for the people you love, including your own child, is dependant upon an opaque, uncaring, and perpetually shifting system over which you have no control.

This is the situation faced by all partners of Swedish citizens every day, and what fills us with an unholy combination of fear, helplessness, and rage when we see the news that Sweden's government is moving the goalposts on citizenship, shifting the ground once again. It's starting to feel like the sort of nightmare where you find yourself running and running – planning, in fact, a whole cross-country course – to reach poles that will provide a basic sense of social security with your family; but as soon as you reach them, they disappear.

What, in other words, is the point of me trying to find a job, any job, that will pay me x amount of kronor per month, just because Swedish laws currently say that that will allow me the privilege of applying for permanent residency to stay with my family here in Sweden, when tomorrow they could announce that it's now twice that amount per month. Or that the category of permanent residency is abolished altogether.

And what is the point of me trying to hit the 20,000 kr/month mark (soon to be required for spouses of Swedish citizens) consistently, as I build up my writing and editing career here via various clients, when by the time I am allowed to apply for citizenship the target may very well shift again. Maybe by that point I'll have to dye my hair white-blonde, cake on bronzer, and jump around singing små grodorna in order to have a chance.

And you know what? I'd do it – as long as they told me now, and I actually knew that what they said would hold true.

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