Student exchange organizations are well-established in Sweden, and according to current and former staff at AFS Intercultural Programs, a global non-profit which runs high-school exchanges in over 50 countries and has been operating in Sweden since 1948, the visa permit process for their students headed to Sweden has gone smoothly for over 60 years.
But not anymore.
'We don’t understand what is so difficult about this'
"Two years ago [in 2024] it started becoming very intense," Ulrik Wehner, Director of AFS' programs in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, told The Local. "Migrationsverket [the Swedish Migration Agency] was challenging our insurance policy.”
According to the organization's Chief Risk Management Officer, Larry Barnett, the insurance policy is comprehensive and widely accepted.
"It’s a standard coverage that we provide for AFS participants in over 50 countries around the world. It includes repatriation coverage if the participant gets very sick, it includes psychological care coverage, " Barnett told The Local. "Other than some tweaks, we’ve been using the same coverage for 20 years."
It wasn't just AFS. Mikael Lundberg, Inbound Manager Sweden for Go! Study Scandinavia, which uses a different insurance company than AFS, described exactly the same issue.
"Before 2024 we never ever had any problems getting visas for students outside the EU," he said. "All of a sudden we started to get denials. All the Thai students got denials. Then the reason came through – insurance. The insurance we’d been using for 25 years wasn’t good enough."
The issue seemed to come down to semantics – or to misreading; both organisations told The Local that the Migration Agency had rejected the students’ applications because they found certain sentences in the insurance policies insufficiently clear, despite those same sentences being considered clear and comprehensive by other countries where they send students.
“We couldn’t get any information on what the problem was or how to fix it, “said Lundberg. “They [Migrationsverket] interpreted something in the insurance as somehow not full coverage, but if you read it, it is.”
Barnett at AFS described similar problems: “It was never really made clear exactly what the issues were. That’s what I think made it challenging. What do we need to do? We could always clarify wording or send something supplementary. But the Swedish immigration office was not telling us.”
Disrupting the lives of students and families abroad and in Sweden – for what?
Both AFS and Go! Study Scandinavia went through long processes with the Migration Agency and their respective insurance companies to alter the text of the insurance policies in the ways it seemed Migrationsverket wanted.
In the meantime, the visa permit applications for non-EU high-school students coming to Sweden for their year abroad were simply rejected. The students’ only recourse to salvage their planned study year was to appeal to a Swedish migration court – in Swedish, via the Swedish embassy in their home country, if one even existed. If it didn’t, students and their families had to travel to a neighbouring country to enter their appeal.
In every case, the appeal was upheld and the students were given permission to study in Sweden. But by that time, it was often too late.
“It meant we had to postpone the arrival of some of the students for a month and a half,” said Ulrik Wehner, Director of AFS Sweden. “The students could not start their program in time, could not start school in time. The schools in Sweden were not happy about this. And the students, who didn’t start until the end of September, were just sitting at home waiting to start.”
There were other problems too.
“When they get a denial and then have to appeal, it then it takes so long that by the time the appeal goes through it gets denied again because the paperwork is too old for the immigration agency," said Lundberg of Go! Study Scandinavia. "Then the families in the home countries have to redo all the paperwork. It's a catch-22.”
The anxiety and uncertainty caused at least one student, from Canada, to drop out of the AFS Sweden program.
“At that point they weren’t sure that they would get the visa,” said Wehner. “We would assure them it was a formality, but of course they had gotten a rejection so they weren’t sure they would get the approval, and they had to decide if they would just start high school at home in Canada instead. So they decided to drop the program.”
After the hassles in 2024, the exchange organizations made sure to use the revised insurance policies – sometimes alongside special supplementary certificates and letters prepared specifically for what the Swedish agency seemed to need – for all their non-EU students’ applications to Sweden in 2025. But they were all rejected, again, on the same grounds.
“The permits were rejected on the exact same premises in 2025, even though we had altered the text according to what Migrationsverket wanted,” said Lundberg. “Every other exchange organization has had the same problem. Always the insurance. We have a really big insurance company, with a head office in Switzerland. The insurance had been working for decades, and we changed it for them [Migrationsverket]. But was still not good enough. We don’t know what the problem is.”
The Migration Agency told The Local that it had not altered its legal position on insurance for high-school students, or any other permit applicant.
"Legally, nothing has changed in recent years regarding these cases," Pierre Karatzian, a press officer at the agency, said in a written statement. "However, deficiencies in health insurance are a common reason for rejection and there were just over 20 cases last year (approximately a quarter of all applications in the “other studies” category, which includes upper secondary school exchanges) that were rejected due to deficiencies linked to the requirement for comprehensive health insurance."
Those numbers, he added, referred not only to applications for residence permits for exchange studies at the upper secondary school level, but also to other types of applications that fall under the "other studies" category.
Only seen these kinds of issues before in Poland and the Czech Republic
In all these exchange programs, high-school students from around the world are set up with a one-year spot in a local school in the host country, as well as a home with a volunteer host family, before they even apply for a study permit.
“To apply for the visa we have to have the host family and school in Sweden in place,” says Lundberg. “Immigration needs it. That has to be in place. Several times now we have had this ready, then we have to say to the schools and the families, sorry, they’re not coming. It’s a big let down for the Swedish host family and schools.”
Pierre Karatzian of Migrationsverket noted that "In order for the Swedish Migration Agency to be able to examine the application and grant a permit, a specific school or host family is not required. It is sufficient for the exchange organization to certify that there will be a school placement, that the studies will be full-time, and to provide information about the duration of study. For students who are minors, there is a requirement for arranged accommodation, but for those participating through an exchange organization, it is sufficient for the exchange organization to certify that there will be a host family to receive the child."
Perhaps the most confusing thing for those affected was how low-risk these cases are.
“It’s an exchange student. They are coming, they are covered, they are leaving, they have a return ticket. We have a date when they are leaving,” said Wehner of AFS. “They’re going to be here for 11 months. Why are you restricting their opportunity to learn the Swedish culture and language?"
“Other than Poland and Czech Republic we haven’t before seen this kind of issue with a country rejecting our medical insurance,” said his colleague Barnett in the New York office. “Back when we used to have operations in Russia we had challenges getting participants into Russia.”
The Swedish exchange organization staff also expressed concern at the long-term ripple effects of these apparently senseless denials on Sweden's reputation abroad.
“It’s not good. It more or less looks like Sweden is making priorities in the wrong places," said Lundberg at Go! Study Scandinavia. “They will give up on Sweden. It’s not only Thailand. It’s any country outside the EU – the US, Japan. People are saying that Sweden is hard to get into and that means the exchange students will eventually give up and stop coming."
“We are now diverting students, saying, why don’t you apply for Norway or Denmark instead? We would rather send the students to Denmark or Norway [than deal with Sweden].” Lundberg added. "We [Sweden] look like shit out there."
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