Validation of immigrants’ prior foreign learning as a framing practice

Abstract

This paper explores the attempts by public officials and caseworkers to manage an overflow of immigrants in the labour market in Sweden. I draw on notions of framing and overflowing, inspired by Michel Callon's (1998) work on the organizing of market-based exchange relationships. I argue that validation is best understood as a framing practice, aimed at creating an understanding for the vastness of foreign experience – including skills and competence – of recent immigrants to Sweden, to make this experience measurable and manageable. Validation as a framing practice thereby exemplifies the widespread trust in framing as a way to normalise overflows – to turn overflows into normal flows. However, as the ethnography-inspired study reported here shows, repeated framing does not remove overflows; instead, it produces new and different types of overflows. In the conclusions, I emphasise the heavy investments required by validation in contrast with the fragility of the results it produces in the context of migration management.