Swedish Migration Research Articles

Language learning challenges for adult deaf migrants in Sweden: experiences from a four-year project

ABSTRACT Upon arrival in Sweden, adult migrants are required to learn Swedish at the earliest opportunity. This requirement also extends to deaf migrants, regardless of their linguistic and educational backgrounds. This paper presents findings and experiences derived from a project focused on the multilingual situation of deaf migrants in Sweden. Some deaf migrants have acquired sign language skills from birth and have received formal education, while others have had limited exposure to language and have never attended school. Due to a scarcity of interpreters proficient in different sign languages and many deaf migrants lacking knowledge of such languages, it becomes imperative for them to participate in courses aimed at learning Swedish Sign Language (STS). This enables effective communication with the Swedish Migration Agency and other authorities through STS-interpreters. They are also required, similar to other migrants, to acquire proficiency in reading and writing Swedish. Paradoxically, Sweden imposes the same education duration requirements on deaf migrants as hearing who only learn one language. Consequently, deaf migrants encounter challenges in attaining sufficient language proficiency level for successful integration into Swedish society. The paper highlights challenges and emphasizes the importance of addressing the unique language-learning needs of deaf migrants to facilitate their successful integration.

Making (in)formality work in a multi-scalar European border regime

ABSTRACT The European migration control regime claims to strife for ‘orderly’ and safe conditions of migration, yet systematically generates the opposite. This paper explores the role of informality in creating solutions to enable control and produce order in the European migration control regime by examining two areas of border policy characterised by high degrees of regulation and contestation : the implementation of the Dublin III Regulation (2013) and transnational negotiations over readmission agreements between European states and deportable people’s assumed countries of origin. We focus on Sweden and Switzerland, two countries perceived as having high degrees of ‘formality’ in their migration control regimes, and draw on ethnographic material generated between 2015 and 2018 in Swiss and Swedish migration control agencies. We demonstrate the central role of informality in making formal regulations 'work'. The Dublin Regulation necessitates tacit toleration of informality to be enforced, and readmission agreements rely on informal, transnational politics that neither follow migration law nor respectthe rights and lives of people on the move. The article underscores the importance of debunking the myth of an ‘orderly’ migration control regime, informality is what makes European migration control ‘work’, often to the detriment of people on the move.

Anmälan. Annkatrin Meyerson, To believe or not to believe – is that the question? A critical study of how the Swedish migration courts handle their responsibility to judge in asylum cases, Juridiska institutionen, Handelshögskolan vid Göteborgs universitet, 2023, 324 sidor, 3 appendix

Anmälan. Annkatrin Meyerson, To believe or not to believe – is that the question? A critical study of how the Swedish migration courts handle their responsibility to judge in asylum cases, Juridiska institutionen, Handelshögskolan vid Göteborgs universitet, 2023, 324 sidor, 3 appendix

Outsourcing and backsourcing in a time of crisis – experiences of double opportunism

ABSTRACT This article addresses the question of how public organizations with limited capacity manage to handle large scale crises. The case analyzed in this article is the sourcing of accommodation during the migration crisis in Sweden of 2015–2016. The event was a game-changer in Swedish migration policy following a more hesitant policy than before, even though new and substantial migration crisis have followed since then. Results show how the legal framework for procurements was not adapted for extraordinary events. The Swedish state was forced to pay exaggerated prices as private contractors took advantage of the acute demand. The study develops our theoretical understanding of the sourcing process during crises and show how the short-term perspective and uncertainties that characterize crises encourage both suppliers and procurers of services to act opportunistically.

The Cruel Optimism of Work Permits: Vulnerabilities and Deportability Among Rejected Asylum-Seekers and International Students Pursuing Track Changes in Sweden

This article suggests that recent transformation of the Swedish migration regime has exposed different categories of migrants working in Sweden to deportability, despite the promises that work permits offer. Firstly, I outline the policy context in which deportability works as a cohesive order (Könönen, 2018, p. 59). Secondly, I explore how migrants who go through track changes balance prolonging their stay on the basis of work with the risk of deportation. Here, deportability captures how having a work permit both open doors and at the same time produces vulnerabilities attached to being dependent upon individual employers in the current employer-driven system.

“They Stopped the Lives of Others”: Stateless Palestinians Facing Bureaucratic Violence in Sweden

Official calls for “failed” asylum seekers to leave Sweden ignore the difficulties and harms befalling stateless people who cannot return to previous countries of residence because they lack citizenship. Stateless people are caught in limbo, a position where they have no prospects of return or of attaining a residence permit in a predictable future. To learn the underlying logics and consequences of such limbo and how it is (re)produced in the Swedish migration bureaucracy, this article investigates three data sets: interviews with seven stateless Palestinians, the Swedish Migration Agency’s internal guidelines for the return process, and the same agency’s country reports on stateless people’s situation in the assigned deportation countries. Inspired by Hannah Arendt’s reflections on statelessness and modern bureaucratized societies, the article reveals that there are great challenges to access rights for stateless persons and in holding anyone accountable for decisions adopted by Swedish migration authorities. Moreover, the article shows how limbo induces two interconnected and multilevel technologies in migration authorities: ignorance and repressive consent. As communicating vessels, these technologies form a bureaucratic violence. While diminishing migrants’ access to safety and a dignified life, violence is sustained by legislative changes and insidiously hidden from public debate.

“The Door You Can Walk Through to Society”: Social Inclusion and Belonging in Vocational Programmes for Immigrants

This article presents a qualitative, empirical study of two educational programmes for immigrants that integrate language instruction and vocational training. In the context of migration, social inclusion is often conceptualised as access to social capital. Proficiency in the national language is considered key for employment and fast integration into working life has become a primary goal in Swedish migration policies. This article examines the two programmes from the perspective of inclusion into an (imagined) future professional community of practice (CoP), focusing specifically on the participants’ possibilities to invest in a professional linguistic repertoire. The article is dedicated to empirical analyses and positive factors, recognising the need for research. Data consists of interviews with students and teachers, observations, and video recordings of course activities. Organisational aspects of the courses, such as the teachers’ backgrounds and the courses’ proximity to future CoPs, as well as relational aspects of the learning environments, are considered essential for the participants’ inclusion in a future professional CoP. Analyses of the programmes’ content demonstrate that participants are assumed to lack context‐specific, vocational knowledge, including professionally related vocabulary. The article contributes to knowledge on how inclusion can be managed in practice in educational settings for adult immigrants and promotes an understanding of how vocationally adapted courses can assist immigrants in becoming members of a future professional CoP.

The governance of policy integration and policy coordination through joined‐up government: How subnational levels counteract siloism and fragmentation within Swedish migration policy

AbstractModern welfare states struggle with fragmented policies and siloed governments, as well as with the need to deal with wicked problems. We argue that addressing such problems from the perspective of central government can be facilitated by notions of joined‐up government that, combined with vertical aspects of modern governance, provide a basis for analysis. To embark upon such challenges, we examine policy integration and policy coordination within the complex area of Swedish migration policies in light of the European migrant crisis. Through a content analysis of an extensive qualitative material (interviews and documents), we show that policy integration is weakly associated with joint objectives and decision‐making. As a contribution to prior knowledge in the field, we emphasize the unintuitive finding that counteracting siloism and fragmentation in Swedish migration policy is not achieved through coherent governance ranging across tiers, functions, and sectors but mainly at subnational levels through policy coordination relying on a bottom‐up approach.

Effectiveness in a Political Context – Implications for Migration

This paper builds on the presumption that the idea of effectiveness refers primarily to an organizational and managerial context. It asks the question how this idea is transformed when used as a rationale for action in contexts where economy and efficiency are of minor significance and where no organizational survival is at stake. The EU and Swedish migration policies show, however, that persistent egoistic implications help construct a specific territory as an organization to be managed much like a business firm. It is concluded that the meaning of effectiveness does not necessarily change when this concept is used in an alien context. Instead, references to effectiveness help transform the context to which the concept is applied.

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Swedish-American Borderlands: New Histories of Transatlantic Relations

Temporal dispossession through migration bureaucracy: on waiting within the asylum process in Sweden

ABSTRACT This article examines experiences of temporal dispossession within migration bureaucracy in the case of asylum. Drawing on interviews and ethnographic data with officers at the Swedish Migration Agency and people seeking asylum under the ‘new’ asylum law in Sweden, this article makes visible the politics of time inherent in the distribution of life chances in state practices. Examining the temporal governance of asylum, I interrogate how waiting, time, and timing are enacted as means of dispossession in the asylum process, with a particular focus on the effects of neoliberal time structurings. The analysis argues that migration bureaucracy in Sweden invokes temporal dispossession through the use of temporal governance that withholds frames of intelligibility from asylum applicants. Examining how waiting is enacted as a means of dispossession both through slowing and accelerating timeframes, the analysis reveals the negotiations, strategies, and struggles that take place within the realm of migration bureaucracy, and in doing so, stresses the relational character of time as a mechanism of control. Central to my argument is that migration bureaucracy dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum, yet with very different effects on the distribution of life chances for each.

Non-heteronormative asylum seekers in Sweden: an analysis of the Swedish Migration Agency’s policies on gender and sexuality-related asylum cases

The article discusses the asylum policies for LGBTQ+ individuals in Sweden and the Swedish Migration Agency’s requirements towards the asylum seekers applying on sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or gender expression (SOGIE)–related grounds. The academic explorations of the intersection of forced displacement and nonheteronormativity in the Swedish context remain limited, therefore, the article aims to draw attention to the topic in order to present its comprehensive nature and illuminate on the possible changes in the system. The intervention is a theoretical discussion and a critical analysis of the use of gender and sexuality categories in the context of asylum case assessment informed by postcolonialism and the concepts of discourse and bureaucratic violence. The conclusions of the article outline the flaws of the asylum applications handling process and highlight the power imbalance of the LGBTQ+ asylum seeker vis-à-vis the dominant centre(s) of power.

Family practices, deportability and administrative violence: an ethnographic study on asylum seekers’ family life in the Swedish migration context

Utilising data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork this article investigates (a) how asylum seekers portray family life in relation to their decision to flee their country of origin, and (b) how asylum seekers’ ways of doing family life intersect with the Swedish migration context. Analytically, the article leans on sociologically informed theories of family practices and a conceptual discussion on deportability. The results show how family life among the participants is reconstituted both in terms of geographical closeness and distance, and in terms of ideas about a previous family life in the country of origin and hopes for a possible future in Sweden. The insecurity and the strains placed on people and their family bonds by current migration policies, and the risk of deportation, are interpreted as a specific form of administrative violence that cuts into family practices, serving to maintain physical and emotional distance between family members and break down social bonds.

Swedish migration policy liberalization and new immigrant entrepreneurs

AbstractSweden has allowed immigrants from any country to obtain residence permits for entrepreneurship since 2008. The aim of this study was to explore the outcome of this policy. The study adds time perspective and superdiversity and operationalizes the mixed embeddedness framework to facilitate a quantitative study on three levels of analysis. Detailed register data for two cohorts of immigrants—those who arrived four years before and those who arrived four years after the reform—are used. The results confirm the usefulness of the mixed embeddedness model, that is the institutional regulative context, economic and social context, and individual resources, in the analysis of immigrant entrepreneurship. However, the study shows that the propensity to engage in entrepreneurship is more affected for refugees and students than for migrants with a residence permit for work and entrepreneurship. This indicates a need for further facilitating the process to immigrate for entrepreneurial reasons.

Gender-Based Violence and Deprivation of the Child Rights in the Context of Bangladesh and Sweden: A Study Based on Migration—A True Event of Deprivation of Swedish Asylum Act

Anthropology at home is regarded as a realistic lens to see the real picture of the Social Construction of various countries because of the ongoing shocks of gender-based violence. It is becoming increasingly difficult to judge this field of gender-based violence (GBV) in a variety of social, economic, cultural, and political situations. Poverty, inequality, and women’s empowerment are all major issues that face us today. With the help of events and thoughts, carrying all these associated areas of this domain around the world. Maintained the stance that “All of us are natives now” during the 1970s (Peirano, 1998), and in the 1980s, but with a caution from the more established society that the transition from home to abroad was not easy. Many people regarded doing their homework at home as a challenging assignment, and it was advised to trust the researcher who had expertise elsewhere (Peirano, 1998). In this regard, I feel compelled to share my research-related experiences to examine the various forms of GBV both domestically and internationally. In Sweden 2020, 16,461 assault cases were reported against women in close relationships. That is a 15.4% rise from the 2019 figure of 14,261, reported by the National Council for Crime Prevention. While In Bangladesh According to a recent study of 38,125 women by a human rights organization in 53 of Bangladesh’s 64 districts, 4622 women had experienced mental torture, 1839 had experienced physical abuse, and 203 had experienced sexual assault (Manusher Jonno Foundation, 2020). For Comparative analysis “A true event” has been used as a case study to examine the causes and effects of various forms of discrimination concerning violence against women. That environment may support a personal concern for the historical knowledge of the GBV in cultural anthropology. The article aims to demonstrate how engaging GBV in human trafficking by intimidation and how a Swedish permanent residence holder woman by asylum and her children are deprived based on Swedish alien act and policy through different precedence of structural work in Swedish migration board, the court of Sweden, Civil servant (migration officer), Interview officer. Following the universal act CRC (Convention on the rights of the children) in regards to “the best interest” of the child, the right to life, survival, and development, and respect for the views of the child is questioned comparing Swedish alien act in action. These approaches acknowledge that something special is produced by Different Types of Discrimination in Two Countries Bangladesh and Sweden to identify the true sources of different human rights violence.

Refusing Refusal: The Struggles of Stateless Palestinians in the Swedish Migration Regime

This article explores the ways in which contemporary Swedish migration politics are manifested and performed in relation to stateless Palestinians. A qualitative case study shows how the migration regime of Sweden aggravates conditions of statelessness through managerial aspects of categorisations, temporalities, passivisation and spatialities. The article illustrates how securitised migration politics are detrimental to how statelessness is lived and experienced but also that stateless migrants actively engage with this regime in order to resist, protest and achieve change. Using counter-conduct as a prism through which to analyse migrant resistance, the article further explores how stateless migrants do not passively submit themselves to the outcome of penalising regimes, but struggle for a right of presence.

Negotiating the Wild West: Variegated neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and the wild berry migration industry

Neoliberalisation processes have long permeated Western societies, including a common direction towards neoliberal migration regimes. This paper combines the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation with the recent literature on migration industries, to investigate the neoliberalisation of the Swedish labour migration regime and how it affected and interacted with the wild berry migration industry. It shows how neoliberalisation as a historical and spatially contingent process resulted in the distinct phases of intertwined policymaking and enactment of the industry. The ‘roll back’ phase included mutual interests and ‘intimate relations’ between state and industry, which both empowered and increased the number of private actors, creating structures that remained during the regular restructuring phase of ‘roll out’ neoliberalisation. While adding the perspective of variegated neoliberalisation, the paper deepens the analysis of migration industries by pointing at neoliberalisation as a spatial and temporal process, where the interplay between state and industry, an enlarged number of intermediaries and the increased responsibility of private actors are central cornerstones. The Swedish case shows how the role of intermediaries in the wild berry migration industry was reconstructed in order for the neoliberal migration regime to regulate a previously irregular migration industry. It is concluded that strong but spatially contingent links exist between neoliberal political economies, migration regimes and migration industries.

A narrative of suffering and soil: Swedish migration and settler colonialism in northeast Argentina

ABSTRACT This article examines the narrated memory of a Swedish settler colony in northeast Argentina. Recently, scholarly attention has turned to how migrants of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to colonizing processes in the Americas as they established themselves on lands already inhabited by Indigenous Peoples. The settlement of Swedish migrants in Misiones is here regarded as part of a strategy of settler colonialism advocated by the Argentine state in order to extend the agrarian frontier further and thereby ‘civilise’ and secure the nation’s rural landscape through the presence of white settlers. From this perspective, the aim of the article is to understand how the historical macropolitical framework of settler colonialism in Argentina is interwoven in the collective and individual narratives of Swedish descendants in present-day Misiones. The article draws on ethnographic interviews and observations made in Misiones between 2017 and 2019. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 34 individuals along with walk-along observations at seven Swedish community sites. The article argues that a central narrative of memory among the descendants of Swedish settlers relies upon certain elements crucial to settler colonial societies. However, while this narrative structure is intrinsic to settler colonialism, it must also be analysed as part of a migration narrative. This article brings forth new empirical material from a site in Latin America where Swedish migration history has not previously been studied ethnographically. Further, it brings the study of migration, colonial settlement, and indigenous dispossession together through its analysis of a settler narrative in the particular context of settler colonial history of Misiones.

Outcomes of Swedish migration and economics of the welfare system

This article examines the economic consequences of migration for the Swedish welfare system. The question of whether the high costs of receiving refugees undermine the sustainability of the universal welfare state has received considerable attention in the political debate. While most studies focus on the fiscal burden of refugee reception and the short-term impacts of migration on welfare arrangements, this article advocates a comprehensive, long-term assessment of the effects of migration flows on public finances. Starting from the priorities of the architects of the welfare system, who designed and expanded social policy, indicators are derived to assess strategic goals and considerations. Reproduction of the workforce by managing its age profile, increasing employment levels and the employability of the surplus workforce, and creating conditions that increase long-term growth in the economy are considered crucial for the sustainability of the system. From a purely utilitarian perspective, migration is considered beneficial to the economy, provided that migrants gain quick entry to, and a high employment rate in, the labour market.

Unaccompanied Migrant Children’s Rights: A Prerequisite for the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals in Spain and Sweden

Starting from a child rights-based approach to sustainable development, this contribution underlines and compares the discourses in selected Spanish and Swedish migration and education policies on the rights of unaccompanied minors to education and discusses their impact on the enactment of the 2030 Agenda’s Sustainable Development Goals in both countries. Based on critical discourse analysis, this research shows the co-existence of two different discourses: one on unaccompanied minors as global rights holders and the other on unaccompanied minors as foreign citizens. By describing unaccompanied migrant minors as citizens rather than children, international migration agreements make it possible for the Spanish and Swedish governments to deprioritize other international agreements on refugees’ rights, such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the 2030 Agenda. Furthermore, as child rights and sustainable development are mutually reinforcing, the negotiation of rights shows that there are obstacles to accomplishing rights-based Sustainable Development Goal 4 in the 2030 Agenda.