When I first told my family about the existence of the sambo visa, they were pretty amused and immediately started calling it “the loooooooove visa.” Of course, I cleared up any misunderstandings they might have by showing them this video.
Everyone who is granted a sambo visa is required to enroll immediately in samba lessons and travel in a roving samba-sambo pack. Obviously. Then you have to wrestle a drunken elk. (The winner gets to stay in Sweden.)
Now, I’m no immigration expert, but I get a lot of questions on my other blog, Transatlantic Sketches, about the visa process and what my experiences were. So here goes:
Before I figured out that I could apply for what a residence permit for “individuals who… intend to… cohabit with someone who is a Swedish citizen,” the chances of my boyfriend and I getting to live even in the same country were looking pretty slim. We were going into year 1.5 of our long distance relationship, he was in school, and I was a recent grad without much experience in the job market. The global economy was in the early stages of what would become a full blown funk, and I wasn’t finding any jobs in Sweden (or in the rest of Europe, for that matter) willing to give me a work visa. Epic long distance relationship fail.
Then came the fateful day when I clicked on the link for “Residence Permit based on family or personal connection,” figuring it was worth checking out even though it was probably just for siblings and grandparents or something like that. It took a while to realize that I was actually eligible to apply for this visa through my boyfriend, but when I did, we went full steam ahead with it.
In short, what you need to do is:
- Fill out a bunch of forms to show who you are and that you have enough money to support yourself,
- Get your significant other to send you a “personbevis,” which is a Swedish governmental document proving his/her identity,
- Notarized copies of your passport and a copy of your Swede’s passport,
- A brief personal letter stating when you’re planning to move, where you’ll live, and whether you have an offer of employment,
- Include, excitingly enough, “proof of your relationship.”
Forms, documents, personal letter—no problem. I didn’t have any job offers at that point, but I just wrote something vague, saying I would move whenever I got the visa and continue to look for a job as an English teacher.
Now, proof of the relationship. Exciting, right? I was working full time as a waitress at the time, and the money I was earning was directly related to the amount of pain I felt in my feet every day, so I was not about to leave anything up to chance here and risk having to pay the visa application fee again.
As per the embassy’s recommendation, I printed off airline tickets and copied the pages of my passport with customs stamps. I included about 100 pictures of my boyfriend and I in different locations, with different haircuts, and different levels of tan-ness, labeled with the place and the date. I even included the receipt for the language program I had bought to start learning Swedish. As I said, nothing was being left up to chance.
House of Sweden in Washington, DC. Home of the Embassies of Sweden and Iceland, and the setting for a very exciting immigration interview. Photo: M.V. Jantzen (CC BY-NC)
A few weeks later, I had an interview.
In case you were wondering, is the interview anything like it is in the movies?, the answer to your question is definitely yes. (See The Proposal to refresh your memory.) I scheduled my interview for early December when my boyfriend would be visiting me. While he sat out in the lobby and filled out more paperwork, I was escorted off to a tiny room, just two cute, blonde, middle-aged Swedish interrogators and I, separated by only a giant sheet of bulletproof glass. We spoke to each other through microphones.
I was really hoping for some oddball questions because I had spent the previous 24 hours quizzing him on his favorite foods, his parents’ middle names, whether he had smelly feet or not… and so on. To my slight disappointment, the questions were extremely easy. For the most part, they reviewed information already in the application—where had we met, when had we been together, what was his background, what did I like about him, etc. To be honest, I think they were just trying to see if I answered the questions naturally or if it seemed rehearsed.
Before I knew it, we were done. They told me that I was excused, and I stood up and tried the door. It was locked. “Oops!” they said, laughing. “Sometimes people get locked in there!” Uhh…
On the application website, it said that it might take 6-9 months to get a decision on my application. In the meantime, one of the positions I’d been applying for came through, so I decided to pack my bags and head off to Vienna, Austria, to work for an international NGO.
We had started filling out paperwork in October, turned it in in November, interviewed in December, and in January, about two weeks into my internship in Vienna, I got an email saying that my request had been approved. The whole process took less than three months, even factoring in the holidays. The only problem was that I wasn’t really in DC to pick up my visa anymore.
I emailed the Embassy in the United States and talked to Migrationsverket (the Migration Board) in Sweden and after much confusion, they said I could get my visa stamped into my passport at the Swedish Embassy in Austria. Despite the immigration officials’ expressions of extreme surprise, this must happen fairly often, because I’ve met quite a few people who had to pick up their visas abroad in places other than where they applied from. If this happens to you, keep calm and carry on. Everyone will act like it’s the first time this ever happened in the history of immigration, but it will work out.
Then it was finally time to move to Sweden! In July 2010, my boyfriend drove through half of Europe to pick me and all of my stuff up and take it all to Sweden! Once you get there, the last step is registering at Skatteverket, the Tax Agency, but then you’re pretty much set.
Welcome to Lund! Photos: Kate Wiseman
My visa will be expiring next January, so I’m just starting to go through the renewal process now… it’s not the most fun thing to have to do, but I’m glad I’ve been able to live here as a sambo and continue my relationship with my beloved Swede.
I don’t know what we would have done if I hadn’t been able to come here—maybe one of us would have had to go to school in the other’s country, or maybe we would have found a third country to host us both. After such a long time spent maintaining our relationship alive on Skype, I’m very grateful that we’ve had the chance to live in the same place and see if we actually work well together in real life. And I’m glad that we’ve been able to find out that we do really enjoy each other’s company on a day-to-day basis, through the ups and the downs, through all the laundry dates and bill-paying and everything else that happens in a normal relationship.
More questions about the sambo visa? Lay them on me. And for those of you in the middle of this process—good luck!
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