After sixteen long months of waiting, my Swedish permanent residence application was finally approved.
The anxiety and unease that had been hanging over me for so long disappeared the moment I received the approval email. Today I finally have both the mood and the time to update this space, and in a way, this post feels like putting a full stop at the end of a very stressful chapter.
I had already complained quite a bit in earlier posts about what happened, but the short version is this: Sweden changed its permanent residence rules quite significantly while I was doing my PhD.
Under the old rules, PhD students could apply for permanent residence after completing four years of doctoral studies. There were no extra conditions that made the process especially complicated. In practice, it was similar to converting to permanent residence after holding a work permit for four years. That meant many people used to finish their PhD with permanent residence already in hand.
I started my PhD in 2018. Around 2021, Sweden tightened its immigration policy, and the requirements for permanent residence changed. After the reform, PhD graduates also needed to have a sufficiently long employment contract after graduation, and the salary in that contract had to meet a certain level, before permanent residence could be granted.
At first glance, that does not sound unreasonable. Requiring someone to have a job before granting permanent residence is not, in itself, a strange idea. It was also meant to prevent situations where people obtained permanent residence and then stayed in the country while relying on social benefits without working, which was one of the main reasons behind the reform.
The problem was the Swedish Migration Agency’s one-size-fits-all approach. Current PhD students were swept into the new rules as if their situation were the same as everyone else’s, or rather, as if the new policy had never seriously considered doctoral students at all.
A Swedish PhD usually takes about five years. By the time a doctoral student becomes eligible to apply for permanent residence, there may be only around twelve months left on the PhD employment contract. To the Migration Agency, that remaining contract length often does not count as “long enough.” What makes it even more absurd is that the agency assesses the contract duration from the moment they start handling the case. Given their usual processing speed, several months may already have passed by then. As a result, a PhD employment contract can easily become too short in their eyes simply because they took too long to look at the application.
There was also no transition period when the new rules were introduced. It did not matter when someone had submitted the application. If the decision had not yet been made, the case would be handled under the new policy. After the rules took effect, large numbers of PhD students in Sweden had their permanent residence applications rejected. Many were forced to spend their PhD years not only pushing their research forward, but also looking for what would come next, whether in industry or as a postdoc.
For quite a long time after the new policy came into force, even the Migration Agency’s own interpretation of the rules seemed messy and inconsistent. In complicated cases, whether an application would be approved often felt impossible to predict. The teachers’ union also raised the issue with the agency, pointing out that the new policy had failed to take doctoral students into account and was fundamentally unfair to them. There were seminars and discussions about possible alternatives. But the agency did not seem to care much. The blunt implementation of the policy managed to offend an entire group of current PhD students.
I was one of the people caught by this change. Because of that, the second half of my PhD was basically spent in a state of anxiety and uncertainty. On one side, I had to think about finding a job. On the other, I still had to keep my research on track and make sure I could graduate on time. This situation lasted more than two full years for me.
In short: it was stressful. Really stressful.
But after all that anxiety, the result turned out well in the end.
Five PhD papers + graduating smoothly and on time + finding a permanent job contract in Sweden + buying a car and a home = settling down in Sweden + getting permanent residence.
Life after this can finally slow down a little. Maybe I can finally start relaxing properly, haha.
Counting from the time I went back to China in 2021 and then got caught up in the pandemic years, it has already been five years since I last went home. So this Christmas, I can finally go back, reunite with my parents, and eat all the food I have been missing.