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Swedish Migration Agency to release new website with improved English information

Sweden's Migration Agency is to release a new version of its website next year, with the view of among other things providing a more up-to-date and accurate English version, it told The Local.

Published: 26 August 2024 11:22 CEST
Updated: 8 September 2024 05:55 CEST

Swedish Migration Agency to release new website with improved English information

Some of the out-of-date information on the Migration Agency's website, about for example the work permit salary threshold, has now been updated. Photo: Becky Waterton/The Local

“Our current website is old, difficult to navigate and resource intensive to manage. We’re therefore working hard to build a new website which should be ready early next year,” Linda Widmark, communications director for the Migration Agency, revealed in an email reply to The Local.

We contacted the agency after migration consultant Saaya Sorrells-Weatherford, co-founder of Emigreat, in a post on LinkedIn highlighted discrepancies between the Swedish version of its website and the various versions translated into foreign languages.

For example, she noted that the Swedish version accurately stated that the salary threshold for an EU Blue Card was 59,850 kronor from July 23rd 2024, whereas the English version of the same page still referred to the previous salary of 57,450 kronor, from August 28th 2023.

And when The Local looked, one page in English about work permits still referenced the previous salary threshold for work permits, two months after the figure was updated, although the correct salary threshold was also mentioned on the same page.

Both mistakes have since been corrected.

Sorrells-Weatherford argued that the discrepancies meant that permit applicants, whose native language usually isn’t Swedish, had to resort to consulting the Swedish website to ensure the accuracy of the information, sometimes by relying on Google Translate.

“If the purpose of the Migration Agency’s page is to inform immigrants of their requirements, rights, and processes, having the most comprehensive information in Swedish defeats that purpose. People are using the website for information about their future, and having the information directly from the source be wrong or out-of-date breaks trust with the agency,” she told The Local.

She also pointed out that the “news” section of the Swedish website was updated far more frequently than the English version, although the English version does tend to focus on news updates that are of particular relevance to permit applicants.

Widmark from the Migration Agency described keeping the detailed and comprehensive information on its website up-to-date as “a major challenge, linked to cost and quality”.

“We use outsourced translators and a translation usually takes a week. Sometimes when it’s extra urgent to get the information out, we publish the Swedish page first, before we have all the translations ready,” she said.

“It happens that we miss changing figures on some page in some language. We apologise for that and are very grateful if readers get in touch so that we can correct them.”

The Migration Agency publishes information in more than a dozen foreign languages, although the Swedish and English websites appear to be the most fleshed out, with some languages – for example French and Spanish – mainly focusing on asylum migration.

The new website will focus less on having a large range of languages, said Widmark.

“Because the reliability of the information is so important, we will not have 10-15 different languages on the new website, but focus on clear and comprehensible Swedish and English, so that we can work both faster and with better quality on our digital information.”

Sorrells-Weatherford welcomed the news of a new website.

“I think focusing on at least matching the English to the Swedish content is a step in the right direction,” she said. “But I also believe that with the technology available today, having the information and even the applications themselves in a few other languages would be beneficial for faster processes. Some of the English wording used in applications like sambo* are a bit tricky to understand even for native English speakers.”

In the meantime, she urged applicants to double check all information by consulting the Swedish website.

“Applicants should always source from the Swedish page as their last check before applying. If something isn’t explicitly stated in the agency website, they should also call the Migration Agency’s help line at least twice with the same question to check that they are receiving consistent information.”

* Editor’s note: A sambo (short for samboende) is a Swedish word for living together in a serious relationship without being married. The Migration Agency explains in English about residence permits for spouses or partners: “Cohabiting partners are two persons who are not married but live together and have a ‘marriage-like’ relationship with each other. It is not enough for you to have been living together when visiting as tourists, for example.”

Member comments

Anonymous - 27 August 2024 at 09:07 CEST

Am I alone in thinking it’s strange that one must call the agency twice with the same question to ensure the receipt of the same information? To me this speaks of an underlying problem within M’verket: each agent is given too much latitude to make personally colored decisions regarding dis/approval of applications and how much processing must take place to reach their decision. This kind of agency shouldn’t have this kind of inconsistency.
Anonymous - 9 September 2024 at 10:20 CEST

“We use outsourced translators, and a translation usually takes a week.”

This is incredible. Especially now, with the latest advancements in LLM AI, webpage translations should take a few hours, if not less. Not a week! I wonder how much money the agency is paying these outsourcing companies. Throwing taxpayers’ money down the drain, more like.

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With the German far right coming out on top in two state elections earlier this month, the socialist-led national Berlin government has reimposed border controls on Western frontiers that are supposed to see freedom of movement in the European Union’s Schengen zone.

The Netherlands government, which includes the party of Dutch far-right leader Geert Wilders, announced Wednesday that it had requested from Brussels an opt-out from EU rules on asylum, with Prime Minister Dick Schoof declaring that there was an asylum “crisis”.

Meanwhile, new British Prime Minister Keir Starmer of the left-wing Labour Party paid a visit to Rome for talks with Italian counterpart Georgia Meloni, whose party has neo-fascist roots, to discuss the strategies used by Italy in seeking to reduce migration.

Far-right parties performed strongly in June European elections, coming out on top in France, prompting President Emmanuel Macron to call snap elections which resulted in right-winger Michel Barnier, who has previously called for a moratorium on migration, being named prime minister.

We are witnessing the “continuation of a rightward shift in migration policies in the European Union,” said Jerome Vignon, migration advisor at the Jacques Delors Institute think-tank.

It reflected the rise of far-right parties in the European elections in June, and more recently in the two regional elections in Germany, he said, referring to a “quite clearly protectionist and conservative trend”.

Strong message

“Anti-immigration positions that were previously the preserve of the extreme right are now contaminating centre-right parties, even centre-left parties like the Social Democrats” in Germany, added Florian Trauner, a migration specialist at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, the Dutch-speaking university in Brussels.

While the Labour government in London has ditched its right-wing Conservative predecessor administration’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, there is clearly interest in a deal Italy has struck with Albania to detain and process migrants there.

Within the European Union, Cyprus has suspended the processing of asylum applications from Syrian applicants, while laws have appeared authorising pushbacks at the border in Finland and Lithuania.

Under the pretext of dealing with “emergency” or “crisis” situations, the list of exemptions and deviations from the common rules defined by the European Union continues to grow.

All this flies in the face of the new EU migration pact, agreed only in May and coming into force in 2026.

In the wake of deadly attacks in Mannheim and most recently Solingen blamed on radical Islamists, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s government also expelled 28 Afghans back to their home country for the first time since the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

Such gestures from Germany are all the more symbolic given how the country since World War II has tried to turn itself into a model of integration, taking in a million refugees, mainly Syrians in 2015-2016 and then more than a million Ukrainian exiles since the Russian invasion.

Germany is sending a “strong message” to its own public as well as to its European partners, said Trauner.

The migratory pressure “remains significant” with more than 500,000 asylum applications registered in the European Union for the first six months of the year, he said.

‘Climate on impunity’

Germany, which received about a quarter of them alone, criticises the countries of southern Europe for allowing migrants to circulate without processing their asylum applications, but southern states denounce a lack of solidarity of the rest of Europe.

The moves by Germany were condemned by EU allies including Greece and Poland, but Scholz received the perhaps unwelcome accolade of praise from Hungarian right-wing Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Moscow’s closest friend in the European Union, when he declared “welcome to the club”.

The EU Commission’s failure to hold countries to account “only fosters a climate of impunity where unilateral migration policies and practices can proliferate,” said Adriana Tidona, Amnesty International’s Migration Researcher.

But behind the rhetoric, all European states are also aware of the crucial role played by migrants in keeping sectors going including transport and healthcare, as well as the importance of attracting skilled labour.

“Behind the symbolic speeches, European leaders, particularly German ones, remain pragmatic: border controls are targeted,” said Sophie Meiners, a migration researcher with the German Council on Foreign Relations.

Even Meloni’s government has allowed the entry into Italy of 452,000 foreign workers for the period 2023-2025.

“In parallel to this kind of new restrictive measures, they know they need to address skilled labour needs,” she said.