The Local’s Mandy Pipher connects with her fellow immigrants to Sweden over football and rounds up our top stories of the week.
Immigrating to another country is a strange thing. Despite some key differences, Sweden and Canada have a fair bit in common and I have long felt at home in Umeå, even when just visiting, so there many ways in which moving here from the other side of the Atlantic just hasn’t felt like such a big deal.
I frequently miss Toronto’s excellent diverse food culture (sometimes I drift off into full-on fantasies about returning to my favourite hole-in-the-wall Vietnamese restaurant) but the deeper things – feeling alienated or displaced, or realising that something has fundamentally changed – have emerged more slowly and subtly.
Sometimes these deeper things rise to the surface during a rough stretch – when I’ve been hit with back-to-back child-borne illnesses precisely when things are busiest at work and the child herself is fighting with me about everything, for example – or when something important happens with my family and I can’t be there (“attending” my grandmother’s funeral over Zoom was a low point).
And sometimes those deeper aspects of being an immigrant come up in joyful moments. I had such an experience last week, at the summer party held by (and at) my community co-working space. Well… not at that party, strictly speaking. The party to which I had been invited was great – a lot of the people in my co-working space are actors or artists, so there were games and music and some lively, interesting conversation. But it was the party going on in the adjoining room that gave me my Special Immigrant Moment.
The other party was a football-watching party: the room next door had a big screen, and the local Bosnian community had booked it to watch a World Cup match between Bosnia and Canada. As anyone who listens to our podcast knows, I am shamefully ignorant about football, so I didn’t even know Canada was playing that night until someone told me. But when the national anthems started, I could see the screen out of the corner of my eye and got curious: were they playing in Toronto? I crept into the next room.
They were. As I sat incognito among the Bosnian fans, watching Alanis Morissette sing the Canadian national anthem in a mix of English and French while the camera panned around the diverse Toronto crowd in the stands, then zoomed out to show the towers and lakefront of my hometown, I got misty-eyed. Maybe I finally understand the appeal of “sports”, I thought as I slipped back to the original party.
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Back with the Swedes, I excitedly told everyone that I had just unexpectedly seen a live moving image of the city where I grew up, for the first time in two years. They were kind and supportive, but whether it was that their muted Swedish reactions weren’t enough for my North American expectations or that they didn’t have the immigrant experience themselves, I felt like I was alone with my feelings.
Then the Bosnians came out during a break in the game. A Croatian-Swedish fellow with a foot in both parties hauled me over and made introductions – “We have a Canadian here! From Toronto!”
I was briefly apprehensive (how seriously did they take this football match?), but I’d barely got out the words that I’d just seen my hometown on their big screen when the Bosnian crew threw their arms up in hurrahs and welcomed me into the fold. An older middle-aged man in a baseball cap pulled an unmarked clear glass bottle from somewhere and a woman of about the same age in round glasses and a big smile told me “drink it in one go, like this!”
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Somehow there was a glass in my hand now, full of a pale yellow liquor that the man with bottle explained was “from our country.” With a loud skål! the older woman and I downed the contents of our cups. It was delicious (a colleague from The Local’s Austrian sister site informs me it was rakija, a fruit-distilled spirit popular in the Balkans).
After the rakija, we were fast friends. I spent the next while in the room with the big screen, not-watching the streamed Bosnian TV coverage of the game while talking in broken Swedish with another Bosnian woman, mother of two Swedish tweens, about making a life i ett annat land (in another country).
Later, out with the smokers, we chatted about how long we’d all been in Sweden (hur länge har du varit i Sverige?) and the man with the baseball cap and the bottle told me he had just hit a milestone: he’d now lived in Sweden longer than he had in Bosnia, and described a classic immigrant feeling – like he belonged in both places, but also in neither.
I know that that is a common experience of “settled” immigrants because in Canada we’ve had large-scale, visibly diverse immigration for a lot longer than Sweden and that, along with an official government stance of promoting multiculturalism as a core Canadian value, has meant that immigrant experiences get a lot more airtime where I’m from. So even though I am Canadian many generations back, in Toronto I grew up around a wide variety of immigrant communities hosting events like the Bosnian football one I now found myself at in Umeå.
And it was really that – a vibrant, open, immigrant community freely celebrating their culture and former country while speaking another language and toasting their newer country – much more than a glimpse of the Toronto skyline that made me feel at home.
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As I biked back, long after the end of the game (it was a draw, my new friends told me… I’m afraid I’m still hopeless at following professional sports), in the bright light of the wee hours of an Umeå June night, which looks for all the world like 11 o’clock in the morning, I thought about how happy I am to live here – and to get the chance, perhaps, of helping to build in Sweden the thing I value most about Canada: a vibrant multicultural society.
What have we been writing about this week?
For work permit holders in Sweden, we reported on the salary threshold rising yet again, this time thanks to new median salary figures released by Statistics Sweden. Work permit holders are also affected by the Swedish parliament voting in favour of a proposal to empower the Migration Agency to deny or revoke residency permits for a “flawed way of life”.
In other politics news affecting immigrants, the Swedish government announced it intends to push ahead with proposals for a mandatory language preschool, despite its own official investigator warning against the move. But whether they’ll get there in time is another matter, since a new poll showed that more than half of voters think Sweden’s government will lose election this autumn.
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Speaking of that election, this week also marked the launch of our election coverage here at The Local Sweden. Our goal is to deliver the most useful election coverage for foreigners, guided by our readers. Here’s how you can stay on top of our election news.
We also wrote about Sweden’s historic World Cup opening game, rounded up the surprisingly many (and sometimes silly) scandals of PM Ulf Kristersson, and asked you to tell us if you’ve had any news on your citizenship application.
Finally, since this was the week leading up to Midsummer, we also wrote about the history of the holiday in Sweden, and what you can expect to be open or closed over Midsummer weekend.
That’s it for this week. Glad Midsommar!
Mandy
Inside Sweden is our weekly newsletter for members that gives you news, analysis and, sometimes, takes you behind the scenes at The Local. It’s published each Saturday and members can receive it directly to your inbox, by going to your newsletter preferences.
Source: The Local Sweden | Sat, 20 Jun 2026 09:28:27
