Swedish Migration Research Articles

The Border Inside – Organizational Socialization of Street-level Bureaucrats in the European Migration Regime

ABSTRACT Borderlands are spaces of uncertainty and constant change, where decisions on the welcoming or refusal of migrants are taken. Today those spaces are far less defined by geographical borders, and thus allow for forms of exclusion to emerge in various moments and places. Often it is street-level bureaucrats who encounter migrant individuals and who base their decisions on their experiences, training and personal values in the context of restrictive policies and laws. This contribution argues that studying the training of migration agents facilitates an understanding of how a professional habitus is shaped, and of how othering comes into being. Organizational socialization reproduces and sustains institutionalized social interactions between the bureaucrat and their clients. The ethnographic data, collected through participant observation and semi-structured interviews with Swiss and Swedish migration authorities, will critically discuss learning processes in government agencies dealing with the detection, detention and deportation of migrants with precarious legal status.

On becoming a sociomaterial researcher: Exploring epistemological practices grounded in a relational, performative ontology

What is the role of the researcher in a world that is continuously enacted and reconfigured in sociomaterial practices, a world in which subject and object, structure and agency, body and mind, knower and known, are assumed to be ontologically inseparable? In this article, I explore this question by drawing on my own experiences of reconsidering essentialist and representationalist assumptions, and becoming a sociomaterial researcher. My exploration draws on my experiences of conducting a qualitative longitudinal case study at the Swedish Migration Board. Specifically, I show what it can mean to ‘invite materiality’ into interviews, examine the conditions of possibility to become in certain ways by tracing the genealogy of practices, and engage with data relationally rather than categorically. By accounting for my experience of working through these practices, I aim to develop and articulate an understanding of what the ontological position underlying a sociomaterial approach implies for epistemology, and of how we can act (or, rather, intra-act) more creatively and responsibly as sociomaterial researchers. Moreover, I highlight differences in the kinds of knowledge that a sociomaterial approach grounded in relational and performative onto-epistemologies, as opposed to a socio-material approach, grounded in critical realism, produce about the unfolding of organizational practices—specifically, the practices unfolding in the reception area of the Swedish Migration Board. The paper contributes to the current debate on sociomaterial approaches, and in particular to the development of practices available to draw upon for researchers taking a sociomaterial approach.

White Women. White Nation. White Cosmopolitanism: Swedish Migration between the National and the Global

ABSTRACTEmerging from the concepts of white cosmopolitanism and white cosmopolitan femininity, this article analyses “cosmopolitan narratives” of Swedish migrant women who lived abroad for an extended period and eventually returned to Sweden. Based on eight months’ ethnographic work, including 46 in-depth interviews with migrants who had returned in Sweden, the article explores how national boundaries are both maintained and traversed in the construction of a “world citizen”. It is argued that the women’s self-identification with a cosmopolitan ethos is structured by whiteness, nationality, and class that grants uninterrupted mobility and “worldliness”. As symbolic bearers of the Swedish nation, national ideals act on the white women’s bodies internationally, in ways that both uphold and re-inscribe the nation into the global. Thus, apart from obscuring global inequalities, white cosmopolitan femininity is imbricated in both national and global politics as a place where global structures reconnect with the white nation, thereby enabling Swedish migrants to re-install themselves into contemporary global settings as self-defined cosmopolitan subjects

The Long and Short Arms of the State: Swedish Multidirectional Controls of Afghan Asylum Seekers During the Cold War

AbstractDrawing on unique sources from the Swedish Migration Agency Archive, this article examines how Afghan asylum seekers and refugees fared in their encounter with Swedish internal and external controls of people seeking protection from persecution during the Cold War. Within a theoretical framework that draws on the concept of statist logic, the history of refugeehood, interactionist sociology and critical legal studies, two key findings are presented and discussed. First, Afghan refugees and asylum seekers encountered multidirectional restrictive control measures despite Sweden’s strong support of Afghan refugees in Pakistan, and despite the low numbers of Afghan asylum applicants in Sweden. Second, a focus on how immigration controls affected one specific national group reveals a broader pattern of how internal and external controls of asylum seekers in the 1980s, under the aegis of the Swedish state, were distributed between state, non-state and international organizations. The article provides a critical history that sheds new light on the situation following the ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015–16, when over 40,000 Afghan asylum seekers entered Sweden. In doing so, the article ties in to a burgeoning development within refugee studies that seeks to include a historical perspective, since such an inclusion is necessary to identify continuities and changes that remain highly relevant for understanding, assessing and offering real alternatives to today’s dominant approaches to refugee governance, policy, experiences, social and political practices and discourses.

Problematising refugee migrants in the Swedish forestry sector

In this article, ideas behind current Swedish efforts to integrate refugees in ‘green’ industries are analysed. We ask why the employment of refugees in forestry, a sector historically and globally notorious for its abuse of migrant workers, has come to be regarded as a solution in official Swedish migration policy. A discourse analytical approach is applied, analysing what the arguments are for introducing refugees to forestry work and how the forest, as a space, is depicted and used discursively as a means for refugee integration. The sources for the analyses consist of articles appearing in the printed press from 2015 to 2017. Three main problem discourses are identified: the ‘labour shortage’ discourse, the ‘refugees in need of work’ discourse and the ‘forest as a health-promoting learning environment’ discourse. The hazardous aspects of forestry work or the fact that refugees might be overqualified for the jobs offered are generally left unproblematised.

Exit, Voice, and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe l...

A Worthy Reception? Ambivalences in Social Work With Refugees and Migrants in Sweden

The purpose of this article is to analyze how reception practices and the meaning of a “worthy” reception of refugees and migrants are negotiated in encounters between various receiving actors in times of shifting Swedish migration policies. The analysis is grounded in ethnographic methodology and draws on data collected in 2016. The aim of the study was to document experiences of the so-called “refugee crisis” in Europe and Scandinavia from a bottom-up perspective among professionals and volunteers narrated during reference group meetings. The reference groups consisted of representatives from state and municipal agencies, the private sector, and civil society organizations. The actors represented in the mixed reference groups were diverse, but all were involved in reception activities. In the analysis we have combined political philosophy about willingness versus ability to receive refugees and migrants with postcolonial theoretical perspectives on concurrent claims and voices. We identified three themes that are central in the negotiation of the practice and meaning of a “worthy reception”: first, the overlooked existential needs of refugees and migrants; second, the lack of gender- and diversity-sensitive reception practices; and third, ambivalences in relation to various refugees groups in times of shifting migration policies. We recommend that in order to promote a worthy reception of refugees and migrants, existential needs must be taken care of and gender- and diversity-sensitive practices must be developed. Another recommendation is to recognize how migration policy limits a society’s ability to receive refugees and migrants, but also affects the willingness among those actors who receive.

Model in disarray: welfare, austerity dogmatism and the u-turn in Swedish migration politics

The winds of xenophobia hovering over Europe have swept the moral political foundations of an inclusive Swedish migration policy into the dustbin of history and twisted an enlightened left-right consensus on an open and humanitarian asylum policy into its mirror opposite. Lured by advances of the extreme right the main political parties have, since 2015, come to indiscriminately embrace the view that immigration, etno-cultural diversity and an open-door refugee policy is detrimental to welfare and, in consequence, curbing migration has become the all dominant political strategem in vying for votes. The authors challenge this widely accepted narrative by arguing that the sustainability of the Swedish welfare state has not been undermined by migration but by consecutive Swedish governments' unbending adherence to austerity politics since the beginning of the 1990s. Austerity politics have, step by step, weakened the Swedish Model's socially integrative functions and prevented the implementation of an ambitious agenda, harvesting a potentially dynamic interplay of expansionary economic and social policies and a humanitarian asylum policy.

Unaccompanied Children Claiming Asylum on the Basis of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

This study explores the asylum claims of unaccompanied children concerning sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) and examines how case officers at the Swedish Migration Agency (SMA) respond ...

On Receiving Asylum Seekers: Identity working as a process of material-discursive interpellation

This paper responds to recent calls to study how materiality is implicated in the process of subject positioning by grounding itself in a relational and performative ontology. By situating our analysis in Barad’s post-humanist view of discourse as material-discursive practice, and by drawing on the concepts of interpellation and hailing, we show how material-discursive practices at three different service sites of the Swedish Migration Board are profoundly constitutive of the manner in which asylum seekers and officers become hailed into various subject positions. In so doing, our study contributes to the development of a post-humanist understanding of how subject positions are enacted and governed within organizations. More precisely, we move beyond the conception of the intentional human and the non-intentional non-human in order to foreground the manner in which mundane material-discursive practices always and already condition (or govern) the possibilities for subjects (and objects) to be and to act, specifically and immanently. Thus we suggest that matter and soul are intertwined in ways that make their separation less convincing, if tenable at all.

Exploring the “Liberal Paradox” from the Inside: Evidence from the Swedish Migration Courts

Courts are influential actors during the implementation of immigration policies in liberal democracies. The “liberal paradox” thesis stipulates that courts are driven by logics that hamper restrictionist immigration policies. This study contributes to this theory by exploring the norm construction of impartiality among judicial workers in Swedish migration courts when deciding asylum appeals. Its findings contradict the liberal paradox assumption that courts act according to inner logics that benefit immigrants’ rights. At Sweden’s migration courts, judicial workers show impartiality by using a skeptical approach to asylum applicants and do so to distance themselves from the political discourse of generosity that has dominated Swedish political debate for decades. The broader implications of these findings are that immigration policy theories can benefit from qualitative research exploring informal norm constructions in courts, as such work can offer new insights about the role of courts in the implementation of immigration policies.

Creating ‘international communities’ in southern Spain: Self-segregation and ‘institutional whiteness’ in Swedish lifestyle migration

This article examines intra-European relations in narratives of Swedish lifestyle migrants living permanently or part-time on the Spanish Sun Coast. It pays particular attention to the complexities of Swedish migrants’ cultural identities and patterns of self-segregation in the Spanish society by investigating the following questions: How do boundaries of social networks that Swedish lifestyle migrants participate in, or interrelate, with a sense of ‘likeness’? In what ways are the formation of these ‘international’ networks mediated through ideas of cultural similarity and parallel difference, and how do such notions both override and uphold boundaries tied to social, cultural and racial divisions? It is argued that the formation of so-called ‘international communities’ on the Spanish Sun Coast tend to cluster mainly north-western European lifestyle migrants, which calls for an analysis of ‘orientations’ towards a certain ‘likeness’, and the function of these spaces and communities as spaces of ‘institutional whiteness’ that work as a ‘meeting point’ where some bodies tend to feel comfortable as they already belong here. The social and cultural boundaries that surround these communities destabilises the idea of a common, culturally homogeneous European identity and display intra-European racial divisions mediated through discourses of cultural differences. What appears is a south–north divide built upon a deep Swedish postcolonial identification with Anglo Saxon and north-western European countries and cultures, and a parallel dis-identification with (the former colonial powers in) southern Europe.

Why did Swedish regional net migration rates fall in the 1970s? The role of policy changes versus structural change, 1945–1985

ABSTRACTThe relationship between local labour market conditions and regional migration has been widely discussed within research. In Sweden, where interregional migration reached a peak in the 1960s but decreased substantially in the 1970s, the role of economic policy has been especially contended in light of the Swedish model and its official stress on regional mobility. By collecting and creating a new and unique dataset on net-migration, vacancy rates, employment and labour income by county, the pattern of interregional migration in Sweden is analysed over a period of time that also covers the early postwar period (1945–1985), allowing for a detailed evaluation of the drivers of migration at different times. My results suggest that there was no significant change over time in the responsiveness of migration to local labour market conditions. The changing patterns of regional migration were therefore more likely the result of changes in the pace and direction of structural change. I discuss the implications of these results for previous accounts of the Swedish model and of the decline in migration after 1970.

Humanitära överväganden i asylprocessen Balansövningar i spänningsfältet mellan solidaritet och ojämlikhet

Humanitarian considerations in the Swedish asylum process. A study of the migration authorities’ balancing act between solidarity and inequality Medical certi cates are becoming increasingly important as a basis for asylum assessments. Using examples from 24 asylum decisions concerning children and their families, the present article discusses how the Swedish Migration Agency and the Migration Courts in Sweden make use of medical certi cates. e common denominator for the decisions was that the children had been waiting for long periods in Sweden for their case to be assessed, and that they were not considered in need of political protection but instead the question was whether they should be granted a residence permit because of distressing circumstances. e study’s practical knowledge about humanitarian considerations is analysed through the notions of bio-legitimation and bio- inequalities (Fassin 2009), which provide for an understanding of how meaning and value are att- ributed to children’s lives and health conditions in the Swedish asylum process. Previous studies of the management of migration, focusing on bio-political dimensions, have discussed the form of the exercise of power, and scholars interested in governmentality have highlighted the state admi- nistration as the unit of analysis. is study aims to provide an additional qualitative perspective in the eld of humanitarianism in the welfare state. Furthermore, the article seeks to introduce the above concepts of bio-legitimation and bio-inequalities in a Swedish context. e analysis of asylum cases shows that humanitarian considerations were entirely focused on formalities and that the child’s actual well-being was subordinate when their humanitarian reasons were investi- gated by the migration authorities and courts. is brought with it both a de-politicization and the fact that no substantial assessment of individual children’s health conditions came about. e growing political interest in children’s health in the asylum process paradoxically means greater limitation in how to appear as persons before the law.

Stigmatisering och rasism i det svenska migrationssamtalet och det diasporiska motståndet

Stigmatization and racism in the Swedish migration talk and the diasporic resistanceThis article argues that the objectifying and stigmatizing characteristics ascribed to the refugee and immigrant populations in the current Swedish refugee debate and the existing discriminatory and racializing practices in Sweden should be analyzed far beyond the recent refugee problematic and the global terrorism related to the political Islam. This study upholds in that way that the practices of objectification, stigmatization, racialization and exclusion get strength from a broader and deeper political context. In this context, the existence of a race biological institute, the project of the Swedish folkhem and its cultural boundaries, the emergence of a systematic discrimination against refugees and immigrants since the mid-1980s and related acts of violence depict the outlines of a white and (mono)cultural Swedish ”imagined community” which disregards the power, dynamism and subjectivity of immigrant and refugee groups. In this respect, the notion of diaspora, which will be illustrated by the Kurdish diaspora in Sweden, constitutes an important platform of resistance as it claims the political recognition for other ethnicities than the native Swede.

Technologies of Displacement and Children\u2019s Right to Asylum in Sweden

Through an analysis of 100 asylum decisions and 10 interviews with 20 asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Agency this article reveals two intricate processes through which children’s rights are displaced in the Swedish asylum process; by overlooking children’s individual claims for asylum through a circle of neglect, and negating children’s best interests. The article demonstrates how the balancing act between migration control on one hand and children’s rights on the other hand plays out in the asylum process, which results in a double displacement; the children are not adult enough to be addressed as asylum seekers and not children enough to deserve qualification as bearer of children’s rights. An in-depth analysis of everyday practices at institutions applying children’s rights is essential both to understand the reproduction of discrepancies between rights on paper and rights in practice, and to explore the potential of rights to disrupt oppressive vehicles of power.

Exit, Voice and Political Change: Evidence from Swedish Mass Migration to the United States

We study the political effects of mass emigration to the United States in the nineteenth century using data from Sweden. To instrument for total emigration over several decades, we exploit severe local frost shocks that sparked an initial wave of emigration, interacted with within-country travel costs. Our estimates show that emigration substantially increased the local demand for political change, as measured by labor movement membership, strike participation, and voting. Emigration also led to de facto political change, increasing welfare expenditures as well as the likelihood of adopting more inclusive political institutions.

Children’s Rights to Asylum in the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal

Children’s rights to asylum have led to political controversies in a number of countries in recent years. This article focuses on the translation of nearly universally recognised children’s rights principles into a domestic practice of immigration control, and explores how legal norms regarding children’s rights to asylum have developed in the Swedish Migration Court of Appeal 2006–2013. Court decisions are analysed with a focus on the meanings given to the best interests of the child, how this is given weight against state interests of immigration control, and how children’s interests are given normative force. It is only in a small minority of cases in which the Best Interests Principle (bip) in fact does have a decisive normative force in granting residence permits and the meanings and use of children’s interests in court argument makes evident that the bip enables both the granting and denial of residence permits. The bip is doing normative work in double directions.

History and changes of Swedish migration policy

History and changes of Swedish migration policy

Interviewing asylum seekers: A vignette study on the questions asked to assess credibility of claims about origin and persecution

AbstractThe aim of the current vignette study is to map the style, type, and themes of questions that are asked when assessing the credibility of asylum seekers' claims. Sixty‐five officials from the Swedish Migration Agency (Migrationsverket), were asked to respond to one out of four different vignettes that contained fictitious asylum narratives. Each vignette presented the types of problems often encountered by officials at the migration board. Two of the vignettes contained no evidence of the origin of the asylum seeker. The other two contained no evidence for the claim of persecution. The asylum officials were asked to formulate five questions that would help them to assess the veracity of the applicant's claim. Our analyses showed that they mainly formulated open questions in an information gathering style. A thematic analysis of the questions revealed that when a claim about origin was assessed, asylum officials mostly asked questions about life in the country of origin, identity documents, and the flight to Europe. When the claim about persecution was assessed, in contrast, asylum officials mostly formulated case‐specific questions (e.g., how the applicant was arrested). Hence, when the credibility of claims about origin is assessed, there seems to be a typical set of questions that asylum officials use. The asylum officials seem to assume that if the applicant is truly originating from a specific country or area, he or she should have ample knowledge about that area, its customs, and frequently encountered objects.