Tag archives for Migrationsverket

The Next Step: Extending my Work Permit

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Whahoo!

It’s been a little stressful lately dealing with various immigration challenges. But things are starting to turn around. Yes!

What’s Been Happening
My work and resident visas expire at the end of March. I was supposed to have six-month permits but due to some bureaucratic hiccups and our non-understanding of the process, I was given permission for just November through March—only four months.

The Migration Board (Migrationsverket) says that you must apply for an extension of your permit at least one month before it expires. I applied for the extension in late January so that was good.

Traveling To and From Sweden
I traveled back to the US in February and before I left, I bought another ticket to travel to the US in April. I was afraid that it would be too hard to see my family for just six days and then leave again without knowing that I would return soon. My plan worked because it felt great to be able to see “See you soon.”

Then the bomb dropped. I found out that the Migration Board says you are not allowed to leave and re-enter Sweden while your case is being decided. You are allowed to stay in Sweden and continue to work but you cannot leave because you may be denied entrance when you return. How strange that would be if I could not do my job, could not return to the life I have built over the last four months here in Sweden. The kicker was that they said the approval of the extended permit would take six to seven months.

I called the airline but my ticket was completely unchangeable. So there I was, stuck with a ticket I had paid for but didn’t dare use.

Passport Control
In an ironic twist, two out of the last three times I entered Sweden, there was no passport control at all. That was most likely due to the fact that I entered from within the European Union. My trip usually originated in the US but I changed planes in Frankfurt, or Munich, or London. EU citizens can freely move between countries so passport control is less necessary. The irony? For the first time, my flight in April will arrive directly from the US so I imagine Arlanda (Stockholm’s airport) Passport Control will be looking at passports and permits more closely. Sweden, like the US, does not like people to enter the country with, say a visitor’s visa, and then try to switch that visa to another kind while you are there. Usually you must leave the country to change your visa type.

The HR woman at my work called the Migration Board and was told (off the record since they say the opposite on the website) that Passport Control would not deny me entrance if I could show my previous permit, prove that I had applied for an extension, and was coming from a country Sweden has lots of immigration agreements with.

Both the HR person and I called Arlanda’s Passport Control to see if they said the same thing. The woman we spoke to assured us this was the case but as always happens when two different officials tell me two different things, I wasn’t sure whom to believe.

Nevertheless, I decided that I was going go anyway. I had already paid for the ticket, it was important to my family, and I was just going to chance it. I could always call my boss from immigration prison and beg him to intervene on my behalf. (Ah, good back-up plan…)

Early Decision
But now, I don’t have to call my boss on a late Saturday night in April! I received the decision yesterday from the Migration Board after seven weeks instead of seven months. It could be because we wrote a letter asking for it to go quicker. It could be because I keep calling them. It could be because mine was a really simple case.

I was so happy that I immediately ran down to what I thought was the Migration Board but was actually the Tax Board to order my new permit card (a biometric card that shows how long you can stay in Sweden…no one has ever asked to see my current one nor is it accepted as an ID…but it’s necessary to have.) I have made so many trips to various Tax Board offices that in my deliriously happy state I got them confused with the Migration Board.

The Windfall
Now that I have permission to stay 19 months, I can apply for a personal number (personnummer). This is done at the Tax Board so I will go back there shortly. I cannot express how many doors will open once I have a personal number. With this number, I can then get a Swedish ID card. (You might recall that I paid the fee to get one of these and traveled all over Stockholm to get to the special ID-giving Tax Board office a few months ago but it turned out having a coordination number (samordningsnummer) was not good enough. One needs the real thing–the personal number.)

The Swedish ID card will allow me to have a full bank account that I can access online. This is important because right now I cannot pay for things like train tickets or memberships online—the way nearly everything is done.

It has also been tricky to look for an apartment without the personal number. Both the private and municipality websites where you stand in queues to find an apartment require a number. Some of them will accept the coordination number and some will not.

I could not purchase trip health insurance the last time I went to the US (a whole other challenge) because I did not have a personal number. Although I am covered here in Sweden, I am not covered when I travel home to the US.

I wrote this blog for four months for free because the lack of a personal number confused the issue of how much my pay should be taxed. This finally resolved itself and I am grateful we didn’t have to wait until the personal number was issued.

You see why this is fantastic news? Whahoo! I feel like I am getting closer to being Swedish. What could be better than permission to live in Sweden and a personal number! (Well, Swedish citizenship maybe…)

Kristin Lund

March 10, 2012

Dashing Through the Snow

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Drop what you're doing and try dog sledding! Photo by Kristin Lund

February is the time many Swedes take a winter holiday from school and work. It’s called “sportlov” because many people do something physical such as downhill or cross-country skiing but its origins comes from a 1940′s initiative to save on heating in schools. Thinking about the upcoming holidays got me thinking about one of the best things I’ve ever done–dog sledding in Sweden.

Unlike this year’s mild winter, the temperature several years ago in Sälen, a ski resort on the western side of Sweden, was a frosty 18 degrees below zero Celsius at eleven o’clock in the morning. When we arrived for our 3-hour ride, my throat welled up the moment I heard the dogs howling. The trainers were harnessing them up to pull our group’s three sleds. Their howls were so primal, so wolf-like, that I’m sure if I hadn’t been wearing eight layers of clothing under my loaner parka, as well as a hat, ear warmers and a hood, every hair on my head would have stood up.

My friend, Helen, and her four-year-old son settled themselves under thick reindeer pelts on one sled and I took up the driver’s position at the back. I had no idea what I was doing. The only direction I got from Lasse, the outfit’s head trainer and our guide, was that I should “bore” the dogs when we wanted to stop. I was to say, “Stoppppppppp…” without any excitement, as if I was yawning and on my way to bed. Lasse told us we could make the dogs go faster by saying “Come on” but that generally the dogs knew how to pace themselves and it was unwise to hurry them up or they might run out of energy too early on the trip.

With that, Lasse untied his sled from the post it was anchored to and stepped off the drag brake. An assistant released my sled just in time because when the twelve dogs I was attached to saw their master go, they were determined to follow even if it meant taking the post we were tied to with us. Away we flew, all of the questions I was going to ask about the intricacies of driving the sled lost in the wind.

We shot through the blue-white landscape like ghosts. The low-slung sled bounced along on the track made by the sled in front of us and I could tell that Helen and her son, who were only raised around three inches off the ground, could feel every bump. It looked as though we had left planet Earth and landed on another planet. The landscape was painted in only blues and white. The snow that collected in the trees never fell off so even the very tips of the trees were white.

We made our way up a gentle slope, crossing under a mile-long chairlift that moved skiers across the flat area between a string of ski resorts. The dogs had settled into a gentle, loping rhythm and I had time to hope that I looked like I had been doing this all my life to anyone watching from the chairlift.

The wind bit through my clothing and I risked taking a hand off the sled handles to tug the scarf over my face a little higher. For the first time I understood the benefits of “performance clothing”.

I didn’t have any.

I wore a hand-me-down parka my mother got for free when she went to Antarctica on a boat. I did not blend in as a trendy Swedish skier. Helen was wearing a snow suit, for example, that had special beacons sewn into the sleeves to let rescuers know where she was in the event that she was buried in an avalanche.

We arrived at our half-way point, a little wooden cottage in the middle of a white plain. There was nothing but white trees, dogs, snow, and some cross-country skiis parked outside. As soon as the sled stopped, half the dogs dropped to the ground to rest and eat snow. The other half engaged in a game of “let’s see how tangled we can get our harness lines” with their nearest neighbors.

Lasse talks to his dog teams during our break. Photo by Kristin Lund

A half hour later, we were off again. The dogs didn’t seem to be anxious to get back to our starting point the way horses do when they know they’re heading back to the barn. Rather they seemed to love the fact that we were now going slightly downhill. I gulped as we headed down a steeper section and I saw the two sleds in front of us make a sharp left turn. Whether they were asleep at the switch or just enjoying some canine humor, my pair of lead dogs missed the turn and took ten or so steps off the track and into the deep snow before they realized their mistake. Only then did they swing to the left, belatedly trying to change course as the rest of the team floundered in the deep snow behind them and the sled did a sort of crack-the-whip ninety degree turn. I threw my weight to the left to keep us from overturning, worried that my passengers were sitting ducks under those reindeer pelts.

At last we returned to our starting point and I stopped the dogs. Even though they had caught up with Lasse, I had the distinct feeling that they would have just kept going, crossing the road in front of us, dodging the Volvos, and loping up the other side up the mountain.

What a ride! I loved it. Any time you can experience a dog doing what it was bred to do—herding, retrieving, pulling a sled—it’s so exhilarating because you can feel in your gut how happy the dog is, how much fun he’s having. And by extension you feel connected and alive and like all is right in the universe.

It was super cold and I had every piece of clothing on possible.

Kristin Lund

January 18, 2012

How to Get a Bank Account in Sweden

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I know it’s Christmas time and everyone’s blogging about baking. But not me, I am blogging about banking.

Banking matters for a foreigner in Sweden are definitely not for the faint of heart.

You’ll remember, dear readers, that I had some adventures trying to exchange American bills for Swedish kronor. You can read more about that here.

You might think, what does this have to do with working? This is a work blog, after all. Well, the answer is two-fold.

Without a bank account, you cannot get paid.
Without a bank or credit card, it’s very difficult to take public transportation to work, buy lunch, etc.

It’s as if cash and checks have gone the way of the dodo bird.

Trying to get a bank account feels like being stuck in a maze...(Buildings in the old part of Stockholm) Photo by Ola Ericson/imagebank.sweden.se

You might also remember from my previous posts that there is a fixed order in which one can go about setting up one’s Swedish documentation. The first thing I did when I arrived was record my fingerprints and photo for my residence/work card (tillståndskortet) from the Migration Board (Migrationsverket).

This took a little while longer to arrive in the mail because it was inadvertently delivered to the neighbor’s house where it sat for awhile before finding its way to me.

Once I got that card, I was able to go and apply for a personal number (personnummer)—the all-important number that is your key to getting all your other documentation (such as an ID card (identitetskort), registration for insurance, taxes, etc.). But when I got to the Tax Board (Skatteverket), I found out that I could only get a coordination number (samordningsnummer). This is a sort of personal number with training wheels that they give to people who are staying less than one year. Even though I am planning to live here permanently, my residence/work card says I will only be here for six months and I must request an extension every six months, depending on my work contract.

Can I just whine for a few minutes that Kate Reutersvärd immediately got awarded a personal number because she came on a “personal connection” visa rather than a work visa? OK, Now I’m done whining…

The coordination number will take four weeks to arrive and I hope that it can be used wherever a personal number is needed. I say “I hope” because I get a different answer, depending on who I ask. The man on the phone from the Tax Board said one thing, the man behind the counter at the Tax Board said another.

I’ve experienced a lot of that and one person told me, well, if you ask 10 Swedes a question, you will get 11 different answers.

This was definitely true when it came to whether or not I needed some form of personal number before I could open a bank account. My employers called 3 different banks to ask whether I could open an account before the personal number was issued (and thereby get paid). No, all three banks insisted, you must wait until you have a number.

Then a co-worker asked if I had simply gone into a bank and asked to open an account. So I tried that and…voila, they said yes.

Take away lesson? Always go in person and don’t listen to what they say on the phone.

I needed to present the bank with my passport and a letter from my employer stating my salary, etc. The bank branch I was at said they could not accept any American money. The next day I exchanged the last of my American money at Forex. I held my breath, wondering if there would be any more problems with the bills. Ironically, they did refuse one bill for not being in good enough condition. That bill came to me directly from an American bank so I guess Sweden has stricter rules about whether a bill can be worn a little and/or torn.

I returned to open the bank account (where, for the record I was depositing money, so you’d think the bank would be very happy). They asked for proof of where my Swedish money came from. I showed them my receipt from Forex and that satisfied them. (These bankers sure are suspicious!)

After a few days, the bank card came in the mail with a letter saying that all I had to do to activate it was to enter my personal number into the telephone activation system.

Seriously?

So I went back to the bank and asked for help. They activated it for me but I am not allowed to use my account online until I receive the coordination number and return to the bank to ask for internet functionality to be added to my account.

Whew! Banking is such hard work in Sweden!

Kristin Lund

December 13, 2011

Impressions after My First Week in Sweden

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Photo by: Candie N (CC BY NC SA)

After my first week here in Sweden, I have some first impressions to share with you. I hope to keep my sense of wonder as I slowly matriculate into Swedish society.

It’s kind of creepy the way my computer knows I am now in Sweden. I know that it sees the IP address I am using but still…Many sites come up in Swedish when I want them in English so I am still arguing with the computer about that.
Why don’t cool, useful things transfer more often between countries? I have never seen the “pay to return” shopping carts system in the U.S. but I think it would be a great success. I have also never seen the “scan you own grocery items” (Coop) system so that by the time you are ready to leave, the food is already bagged and all you have to do is pay. Beautiful!
I really notice the sound of snow tires on snowless streets. I haven’t lived somewhere where people change their tires seasonally for a long time.
I accompanied my friend to a hospital for tests. I was struck by how clean the hospital was. It was even a little “homey—a feeling I have never gotten in a U.S. hospital.
It’s striking how warm it is inside homes and buildings. I think houses are kept—ironically—cooler in California, even in the winter. Here, the interior temperature fluctuates much less than I am used to.
Could “ja men” and nej men” possibly mean the thing? People seem to use them interchangably. Well, “hej” can mean both hello and goodbye so why not?
There aren’t many trains in California. The automobile manufacturers ran them out of time a long time ago. So the trains seem wonderous and very Harry Potter-like to me. My daughter suggested I run straight into the wall on Track 9 to see if I could magically get through to Track 9 ½…But I told her my train is on Track 3. Whew! Dodged a sore head there!
I went looking for ice for my sparkling water in the freezer at work. (Typical American wanting ice, I guess.) I found some plastic bags and reached in there, thinking they were bags of ice but something stabbed me and I discovered they were full of cooked crayfish, leftover from August.
People are willing to speak Swedish to me. I really thought I would have a harder time getting them to speak Swedish instead of English. More on this later.
Setting the time on all my devices…What in the name of all that is holy is the difference between UTC time and GMT time? (No, you go Google it, I don’t really care that much.) When I re-set the time on my electronics, I could rarely choose “Stockholm” but instead had to pick places in the same time zone such as Berlin or Vienna. But I had to look that up first due to my abysmal grasp of geography and complete lack of time zone knowledge.
The 9-hour time difference…It feels like it takes forever for my friends and family to wake up in California…I check the time and find it is 4AM there. I wait a long time and check and now it is not even 5:50AM there…By the time I am exhausted and ready to go home at the end of my Swedish work day, they are finally getting up. They’re really very lazy, these Californians.

Kristin Lund

November 30, 2011

In Pursuit of my Swedish Papers

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Luckily there is less paperwork than this in my future! Photo by: Electronic Frontier Foundation (CC BY NC SA)

Okay! I have made it to Sweden’s shores.

Now it’s time to pursue the challenge of trying to become an “official person” in Sweden. I am, at this time, invisible for all intents and purposes because I don’t yet have the Swedish version of an American social security number (“personnummer”), and other documents and cards that I need to become a legitimate Swedish worker.

Lola Akinmade-Åkerstrom wrote a great piece “10 Practical Tips When You’ve Moved to Sweden” for Sweden.se. I highly recommend it.

It turns out that the order of Lola’s list is highly important. That Lola, such a smart woman.

Due to a muddled brain, jet lag, and various other excuses, I tried to start in the middle of the list. My goal was to open a bank account as soon as possible. This is so I can get paid at my new job. Most Swedish companies deposit your pay directly into your bank account so you need to have an account. I also wanted to have a debit/credit card to pay for things like commuter train tickets, etc.

Working backwards, I saw that in order to open an account, I need a resident ID card from Skatteverket. So I called Skatteverket and found out I need to pay the fee before I visit the office. Then I will show proof that I’ve paid when I get there. But…in order to pay online, you need to enter your personal number. Hmmm, I don’t have the personal number, I thought. I had better look to see how you get one of those. I hung up the phone.

It turns out that the personal number is issued by Skatteverket as well. Oj! I called them back. This time I learned that I can’t get the personnummer until I get my residence permit card (“uppehålltillståndskort”) from the Migration Board.

Aha!

Side note:
Sweden prefers that you get this card while you are still in your native country. However, in the U.S., the only place you can get the card is from the Washington D.C. embassy. The card has biometric info on it with your picture and fingerprints and the only proper machine is in DC. For about 4 months in 2011, the Swedish government insisted US citizens travel to Washington D.C. to get this card before they moved to Sweden. This proved ridiculous because America is such a geographically large country and people like me, who lived in California were nearly 5000 km away from the Embassy. It made no sense to go to D.C. on the way to Sweden just to get the card. Thankfully, Sweden recognized this after a few months and changed the rule to allow people to enter the country with just the Migration Board permission letter. We are now allowed to get the card after arrival.

So, I called the Migration Board and found out that there are very long queues in the Solna office outside Stockholm and that the thing to do is go to the local Uppsala office. The Uppsala office is only open 12pm -3pm, Monday to Wednesday. I realized it was right then 2pm on a Tuesday.

The next thing I knew, I was in my friend’s car, heading to the office…

Don’t miss my next post (arriving shortly) to find out about my adventures driving to the Migration Board office.

Kristin Lund

November 26, 2011

Tag archives for Migrationsverket

The Next Step: Extending my Work Permit

Dashing Through the Snow

How to Get a Bank Account in Sweden

Impressions after My First Week in Sweden

In Pursuit of my Swedish Papers

Kristin Lund

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Tag archives for Migrationsverket

The Next Step: Extending my Work Permit

Dashing Through the Snow

How to Get a Bank Account in Sweden

Impressions after My First Week in Sweden

In Pursuit of my Swedish Papers

Kristin Lund

All of Sweden.se’s blogs

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