I'm extremely privileged that my experience with naturalisation in Sweden was very smooth. At the same time I lived 5 years with some anxiety due to numerous cases of mishaps with immigration processes from personal contacts.
It includes high-skilled immigrants being deported due to a past employer not paying worker insurance, something that as a worker you're never aware of in your payslip, contract, etc. Includes couples being separated for years, waits of weeks to months for getting a permission to leave the country to care for ill relatives without affecting their process. All of it just for the sake of applying rules, not empowering immigration case agents to take decisions pending further reviews, or a justice system that is rigid on the application of rules (as was the case of the missing worker insurance, which affected a few other people).
Living with those reports from others close to me always kept me on the edge of what could happen to me, and this is a great country as an immigrant, including in terms of bureaucracy.
I can't imagine other places with much more confusing and contradictory immigration systems...
UK rules often seem arbitrary or deliberately trying to trap people.
> The rules change all the time and there isn't an 'immigrant newletter - what will fuck you up at the next step'.
That surprises me: I would imagine there are online forums, maybe a subreddit, for such a purpose.
For example in UK your passport application will be rejected if you were not in the country 5 years ago from the exact date the application is recieved by the Home Office. You could pay all fees, taxes, pass all tests, live in country for 20 years, but if you left for one day on Sept 1 2015 and post delivered your application on Sept 1 2020, your application will be denied.
If you spend 4.9 years on a dependand visa, but then your partner gets a permanent residency, you have to switch to a family visa, and your period of 5 years starts all over again.
Student visas don't count to the 5 year period, being outside the country for too long resets the period, for example if you had to help out aging parent after surgery.
The rules change all the time and there isn't an 'immigrant newletter - what will fuck you up at the next step'. Its usually when you try and apply for the next step, you find out you've wasted 5 years.
Also the amount of money I've spent on various immigration and lawyer fees is probably about 40 grand.
There was some bad luck and one poor decisions made, but the bottomn line is, it's easy to fall through the cracks and end up with nothing no matter how resourcefull you are.