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

Abstract

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.

Keywords:

• Deportability
• migration status
• temporary work permits
• rejected asylum-seekers
• international students
• Swedish labor migration policy

Introduction

Over the past two decades, Swedish migration policy has undergone a paradigm shift. On the one hand, there is a policy turn in 2008 from a four-decade long period of one of the most restrictive labor migration systems in Europe, to one of the most liberal (Government Bill, 2007/08, p. 147). On the other hand, there is a fundamental break with a long-held commitment to generous asylum migration politics from 2016 onwards (Government Bill, 2016, p. 752). Both policy shifts are fiercely debated in academia as well as in Swedish politics as they have brought employment to the fore before the right to presence. In this context, this article seeks to explore trajectories and experiences of migrants whose residency rights are conditioned upon temporary work. Drawing on case file applications and interviews, I will shed light on migrants who pursue a path to legal stability through work through a process called spårbyten or track changes. Track changes were implemented with the labor migration policy reform in 2008 and provide rejected asylum-seekers and international students a possibility to switch migration status—with work permits—to temporary workers without having to return to apply from abroad. By attaching residency rights to temporary work, such policies in Sweden creates opportunities and opens doors that otherwise would be closed, but it also lays down conditions for severe vulnerability. To show this, I will use the concept of deportability thought of as a condition (Willen, 2007) that is pertinent for a broad range of migrants. It is then not merely about irregular migration. Rather, deportability is used in a wider sense with the intention of also capturing migrants who might not in the first place be associated with deportation, taking into consideration the conditions attached to temporary residency permits based on work.

Sweden makes a particularly suitable case to explore the role of work in relation to efforts to acquire a more secure or legal residency permits. The open labor migration system devises work permits in an employer-driven policy with no formal distinctions between skills, qualifications, or civic integration requirements. Also, employment is allocated to migrants who are typically kept separate from labor migration channels, such as rejected asylum-seekers, and from 2016 onwards, to refugees with temporary protection statuses. This means that different categories of migrants in Sweden (quota refugees not included) are in a position from which having a job can emerge as pathway to legal stability. Yet paradoxically, as I argue in the article, for some this comes with a high price of deportability or ‘the protracted possibility of being deported’ (De Genova & Peutz, 2010, p. 14; Sager & Öberg, 2017). As the article will show, when policies curb permanent residency for migrants in an employer-driven system, both those who have generally been unattached from job and income requirements in Sweden, such as asylum-seekers, and those who are typically privileged with direct access to permanent residency, such as international students in higher-skilled jobs in this article, paradoxically find themselves under the same umbrella of deportability.

The Swedish policy context

The labor migration policy reform in late 2008 is nowadays well-researched. It is known as ‘revolutionary’ mainly with references to how it delegated control of labor migration selection to individual employers and merged all labor migration statuses into a single-streamed category covering temporary work permits. The reform opened entirely new channels for migrants who can work temporarily in all sorts of jobs, irrespective of skills and qualifications, to later apply for permanent residency. The legal possibility of track changes is furthermore atypical in terms of merging the asylum and labor categories, as well as exempting migrants from a fundamental principle in migration policy that work permits for foreigners must be applied for from abroad, in allowing them to be arranged from within the country. Track changes are possible also because, Sweden against the trend in most Western countries, offers a legal exemption for asylum-seekers to work while waiting for their asylum claims to be evaluated, which has been in place since the 1990s.

Some years after the reform, following the immigration peak in 2015, a second shift took place with emphasis on employment, this time in asylum migration. In 2016, a six-party political agreement sparked a series of legal measures of which one was to temporarily insert a job and income requirement into nearly all refugee categories before permitting permanent residency and family reunification (Government Bill, 2016, p. 752). In 2021, the job and income restrictions in the interim legislation were made permanent.

Previous studies consider how these policy shifts notably break with a long period when posing job and income criteria before residencies was severally restricted in Swedish migration politics (Emilsson, 2018; Garvik & Valenta, 2021). Roughly described, the Swedish position has been to offer quick and unconditional access to permanent residency for non-citizens with legal statuses. For example, permanent residencies were issued to work permits holders in shortage jobs (in other cases temporary). Refugee protection categories, whether with temporary or permanent statuses, were firmly detached from job and income requirements. And generous welfare rights were offered for temporary residents. Simply put, Swedish migration politics epitomized the model of what Hammar (1990) called denizenship, referring to the principle of giving degrees of rights to legal residents of a country who are not naturalized citizens. The debate whether these shifts deal with the assumed failures or societal costs of irregularity or permanent migration (Parusel, 2016b), or if the policies are actively involved in pursuits for cheap and flexible labor through, for example, the creation of deportability and precariousness (De Genova, 2002; Goldring et al., 2009), remains out of the scope of this article. Instead, my focus is on qualitatively exploring the experiences of two different categories of migrants, who by virtue of changing migration status, pursue a path to legal residency with work permits.

From previous research on the Swedish context, we already know that work permits are used in resourceful ways as ‘front doors’ and ‘backdoors’ to stay, to paraphrase Bonizzoni (2018) since the labor migration policy was implemented in 2008. In existing research, there are for example suggestions that the accessibility of work permits has produced certain trajectories in and out of work. Bevelander et al. (2014) and Emilsson (2016) have shown how permits work as openings for migrants to enter on the basis of employment and switch to the asylum channel. Their research indicated overlaps between labor and asylum migrations with figures on how more than half of temporary migrant workers between 2008–2010 had applied for asylum, either before or after they received a work permit. Others, such as Frödin and Kjellberg (2018) identified a significant percentage of migration track changes (43%) in their analysis of all work permits in lower-skilled sectors during 2012. Pelling (2015) has drawn on qualitative interviews with 45 Iraqis in 2012 to explore the use of work permits for surplus low-status sectors from countries that have high rates of asylum applications. To explain this link, she considers the use of work permits as alternative channel for migrants who are otherwise restricted from bringing forward protection claims, hence her mixed term “migrant workers in need of protection” (Author’s translation from Swedish skyddsbehövande arbetskraftsmigranter). Previous studies have tended to analyze specific sectors and labor market positions (berry-picking, low-paid jobs, restaurant work, cleaning, higher-skilled work), or particular migrant groups (Chinese, Iraqi, Indian, Iranian, Syrian, labor migrants, students, refugees, irregular). In this article, I bring together two different categories of migrants who have a unique legal alternative to change residency claims without leaving the country, and whose residency rights are conditioned upon temporary work. By applying deportability as a conceptual lens to analyze the experiences of these migrants, the article makes two main contributions. Firstly, it supplements ongoing debates in the literature on the suitability of deportability on different categories of migrants, highlighting various forms of vulnerability, beyond the focus on undocumented individuals. (Basok et al., 2014; Landolt & Goldring, 2015; Menjívar, 2006; Vosko, 2016). Secondly and relatedly, it displays some of the consequences of conditioning residency rights on temporary work in Sweden. The article displays how different migration categories - asylum-seekers and international students - are at risk of deportation in the current employer-driven system, despite the promises that track changes offer.

Deportability

In Sweden, deportation has mainly been associated with visa overstayers and asylum-seekers who stay after rejected claims for asylum and considered a minor issue in comparison with Central or South European countries (Parusel, 2009: Düvell, 2010). Over the past two decades, a perceivable deportation gap between those eligible for deportation and actual removals in Sweden is acknowledged through a series of commitments to cooperate between the Migration Agency, the police, and the correctional system to increase deportations and more recently, through political promises to intensify (and expand) deportation of rejected asylum-seekers in the aftermath of the so-called refugee crisis in 2015/2016 and in the five-party Tidö Agreement in 2022 (Jansson, 2016; SOU, 2021). The concept of deportability, or ‘the protracted possibility of being deported’ (De Genova & Peutz, 2010, p. 14), encompasses however a broader meaning than practices of deportation. De Genova coined the concept to highlight the link between migration policies and the regulation of the labor migration through an irregular or undocumented workforce (2002). As noted by Franck and Vigneswaran (2021), while initially applicable to irregular migrants in the literature, deportability is nowadays also recognized as relevant for regular and employed temporary workers (see Basok et al., 2014; Menjívar, 2006; Vosko, 2016).

The approach to deportability in this article builds upon the conceptual framework of assemblage of noncitizenship developed by Landolt and Goldring (2015) which regards migrant experiences of conditionality as both produced by policies and negotiable through the agency of migrants. This framework fits well into the ways in which I conceptualize and understand the consequences that recent policy changes in Sweden have brought on for different migrants on the ground. I find the framework suitable for studying track changes through the lens of deportability, since a wide range of experiences that rejected asylum-seekers, students or other temporary migrants encounter, can thereby be recognized. As the article will show, the status, trajectories and experiences of migration exposed in the article are not in any way unidirectional, nor do they fit very well into binary understandings of migration (irregular, regular, refugee, labor migrant etc.). The framework is therefore well suited for an exploration of migration as ‘continua of statuses and transitions’ between and across categories and statuses, as phrased by Vickstrom (2014, pp. 1068–1069). It is also useful for exploring the dynamics between policies, laws and practices of those for whom work permits become a way to stay in Sweden and those aiding them - with an emphasis on the agency of migrants. As the framework of assemblage of noncitizenship asserts, what we see on the ground does not necessarily conform to trajectories or outcomes expected by the policies. The experiences of deportability are then seen as intertwined with migrants’ agency to resist, reshape, or find ways to subvert migration categorizations or regulation in order to stay. Deportability seen in this way, captures ambiguities and vulnerabilities alongside different migrants’ agency to meet formal conditions required for a track change through with work. Differently put, as the article shows, whilst rejected asylum-seekers and international students might have diverse agencies and migration aspirations, deportability help explain their shared experiences of prolonged temporariness and employer dependency in the current open Swedish work permit system.

Method and material

The empirical material presented here is drawn from a research project on overlaps between labor, student, and asylum migrations in the aftermath of the Swedish labor migration policy reform of 2008. In the project, I examined the reform and more specifically so-called track changes with an interest in the experiences of migrants amidst the growing salience of employment as a condition for permanent residency. I used an eclectic mix of data consisting of qualitative interviews, documents, statistics, case file applications collected and analyzed through techniques that fed my theoretical and analytical lens in a process inspired in grounded theory. I also relied on official statistics, policy documents, reports by stakeholders. This article draws on selected parts of this empirical work in ways explained next.

A bulk of primary data comprises archival data, that is, case file applications for track changes through work, which consists both of rejections and granted cases. The case files allowed me to identify and extract information from individual applications for track changes held at the Swedish Migration Agency’s archival unit.¹ From a sample of 99 randomly selected individual applications from 2015² (the closest year to data collection), in this article, I include rejected asylum-seekers and former international students who switch to work permits while staying in Sweden, reducing the case file sample to a total of (n = 56). Each individual application includes different documents relating to the track change: asylum investigations, employment offers, work permit decisions, work conditions, information about the workers and employers, student records, bank account statements, acceptance letters from universities, emails and telephone correspondence, information about legal representatives and so forth. It also provides the migration track record of the individual migrant before applying for a track change (and in some cases after). A complementary set of primary data comes from qualitative interviews. As part of the research, I conducted a total of 46 interviews which took place from 2013 through 2017. The selected interview material informing this article is however limited to 20 interviews with migrants and stakeholders.³ The migrants interviewed comprise nine men and five women with diverse experiences of switches of statuses on the basis of work; in the process of applying for status change, working during asylum application, having switched statuses with work permits, former students pre- and post- track change, undocumented migrants, different countries of origin and of various ages. These interviewees were working, or had worked, in restaurants and cafés, education, the IT sector, cleaning, pharmacy, tourism, administration and newspaper distribution. Eastmond explains that interviewing migrants about their migration stories is a suitable technique for researchers to attain diversity and collect mixed stories to avoid over-generalized notions of who she calls” experiencing subjects” (2007). During the interviews with migrants, I used open-ended questions (Charmaz, 2006) though which I sought personal accounts around the circumstances surrounding work permits within overall migration narratives. The migrants were asked to freely talk about their migration experiences. Nearly all interviewees talked about contacts, their journeys, choices made, information channels, what they did, why and how they ended up where they did and what their aspirations had been—without me asking specific questions about it. Whenever they did not mention anything of substantial value for the decisions and circumstances around their track change, I would then raise who and what questions: who helped them, how they got information, what they aspired to, how did they achieve their goals and what obstacles they encountered, and so on (Kvale, 1996, pp. 133–135). The stakeholder interviews included in the article were conducted with a small sample of government officials, municipality officials, experts, migrant organizations, with the purpose of deepening my understanding of the experiences of track changes and to map information channels, facilitators, and barriers.

All in all, the case files and interviews resulted in a compilation of unique empirical data which was analyzed iteratively using grounded theory coding techniques. I created short codes close to the data, preserving actions, posing “what is happening” questions and comparing across data types (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2015). To begin sorting the mass of information from the case files into manageable codes, I used the coding technique of creating descriptive labels and moving quickly through the data (Charmaz, 2006; Corbin & Strauss, 2015). I composed 20 pseudonymized labels/variables for each application in a database in SPSS.⁴ The labels provided me with an index which I could group into the following processes and events:

1. Length of stay (years between first and last application)

2. Method(s) of entry

3. Number and order of status changes

4. Type of admission and legal channels

5. Country and origin and age

6. Job sector/employer

I ordered the codes according to time frames, job sectors, country of origin, location and number/order for track changes. I noted and selected cases that were either illustrative of common trajectories or not fitting the patterns to extract more information from these cases. This was then logged into separate pseudonymized memos and coded in synchronization with the interviews with migrants. When coding the interviews, I used words or phrases used by the interviewees (Charmaz, 2006). Although the coding was interrelated, I created separate coding arrangements for each source. The main reason for this was that the interviews, besides consisting of different types of information also permitted line by line and word by word coding while I approached case files more on a priori premises. From the interview transcripts I was for example able to extract verbatim quotations to specific headings/themes/codes. I could also contact the interviewees for additional interviews (which I did on one occasion). Moreover, in the interviews I was differently involved in constructing the data—by posing my own questions and interacting directly with the interviewees. To still uphold links and comparisons between the different types of data, I made sure to mix coding between interviews and case files and used memos across all data. In sum, by combining the data produced from the case files with qualitative interviews, I have gained a more nuanced understanding of track changes, including their implications and the meanings attributed to them.

The promise of a work permit

Migrants might migrate initially for one reason and change the grounds of their residency once en route. There might be mixed purposes of entry and residency at once (Long, 2013), or migrants may overstay visas (Sigona & Hughes 2012, p. 6) or change migration status from one admission channel to another to regularize or after having lost a previously granted permit. This can happen to asylum-seekers whose claim for protection is rejected, labor migrants who risk losing their temporary residency permit upon loss of work permits or jobs, students who stay after graduating from their studies, or spouses who lose their right to stay after separation and divorce, and do not return (Parusel, 2016b). In most cases, changes of purpose of stay are translated into loss of residency rights from the point of view of migration control, as labor, asylum and education channels are separated in policy and law. As stated earlier, in Sweden work permits offer however an opportunity to change residency claims without leaving the country. As one of few countries that allows rejected asylum-seekers to switch migration status—with work permits—to temporary workers without having to return to apply from abroad, asylum-seekers with rejected protection claims gain a legal second chance at residence by switching into temporary work status through track changes (spårbyten). International students are also included in the legal proxy of track changes and can also switch to work permits without return in one of the most legally permissive rules in a European context (Government Bill, 2007/08, p. 147; Parusel, 2016a). This means that, on paper, migrants whose migration reason change while they are residing in Sweden, are given a second chance to apply for residency permit based on temporary work, if they can show a work history simultaneous with seeking asylum, or meanwhile/after studying.

Yet, a closer examination into track changes shows more complex trajectories than single switches from one migration channel into another. Rejected asylum-seekers, in particular, have disordered mobilities with overstaying residency permits, reentries, or clandestine entries, before applying for a track change. Some have a history of entering with work permits after their asylum claims or renewals of work permits have been rejected. Others have records of irregularity or have emerged from life in the shadows. Among the applications from rejected asylum-seekers in the case files, one out of five started their trajectory more than a decade ago, with examples of irregular stays or several status transitions in between entry and application for the track change. Lengthened trajectories should not be a surprise among rejected asylum-seekers since they, per definition, have failed and repeated claims and hence longer trajectories in their migration biographies are expected. But the presence of periods of irregularity and various consecutive migration status changes suggest that track changes function, as a last resort when every other option is exhausted, rather than offering a direct transition for working asylum-seekers—as projected by policy (cf. Calleman, 2015, p. 325). The interviews also depict this link to deportability. For example, in the case of William for whom a track change materialized as a last resort and was one out of many channels to stay after having sought to avoid deportation from years of living in irregularity. Work permits might also offer a new foothold to stay, for example after divorces during temporary residencies for accompanying spouses or family reunification migrants who seek to avoid deportation. As these migrants, mostly women in the material, sidestep the requirement to leave Sweden, work permit offer an alternative to stay, provided that they have been working as asylum-seekers or as accompanied spouses. Track change trajectories display in other words little resemblance with linear passages as expected by the legal proxies of track changes. Instead, they relate in different ways to deportability and materialize as fragmented journeys (Collyer, 2010), status mobility webs (McIlwaine, 2015), chutes and ladders (Goldring & Landolt, 2013) to use concepts from the migration literature. But to further capture the experiences of deportability, it is necessary to highlight how work permits are part of an employment transaction with individual employers in the driver’s seat. This will be discussed next.

Individual employers as helpers

The absence of any official screening of employer needs or selection of employee skills or qualifications in the Swedish labor migration policy, enables work permits in segments of the labor market that were practically inaccessible prior to the reform, for example in low-pay sectors. In the material, this is noticeable in various ways. Firstly, applications for track change among rejected asylum-seekers are concentrated in lower-skilled surplus occupations such as restaurant workers, cleaners, and home service assistants. For women, a pattern is found in cleaning and home service assistant jobs, and men are found in the restaurant sector, as fast-food workers, and kitchen assistants. Moreover, such segmentation of track changes in low-pay jobs and surplus sectors is comparable to the findings of previous research on the Swedish labor migration policy reform. It is also consistent with research showing that foreign-born men in Sweden mostly work in the hotel and restaurant sectors, while foreign-born women are found mainly in the care sector, indicating that the employers active in track changes are largely found in niches of the labor market where the prevalence of foreign-born workers is high (Emilsson, 2016; Frödin & Kjellberg, 2018). Secondly, the porousness of the Swedish work permit system allows individual employers to offer low-paying jobs in businesses owned by kin and families. In my material, I note how individual employers operate as ‘guarantors or deservingness’ (Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014, p. 426) in surplus low-status sectors from countries that have high rates of asylum applications or as co-ethnics. The interviews confirm that work permits appear on the radar for rejected asylum-seekers and international students primarily through migration networks, family members, friends, and organizations working with migrants offer jobs and assist with information, or tips and legal advice. Support is also found in social media, internet sites, churches, and local communities. Comparably, research from other countries on migrants with temporary or irregular statuses have shown that jobs are frequently mediated through people from the same country of origin or community (Datta et al., 2007). There are empirical suggestions of ‘co-ethnics’ playing a pivotal role in acquiring (legal) migration status (Cremaschi & Devillanova, 2016). Similarly, in Sweden, qualitative research has shown that social networks including family, friends and kin play a key role in helping migrants with work permits (Nordlund & Pelling, 2012).

Track changes connected to international students are also interesting to explore in this sense as one expects that these migrants benefit from the system’s non-selectivity and the possibility to combine part-time jobs or switch status to work permits without return. Rather than a concentration into surplus sectors, the case files display here a variance between higher-skilled occupations with international IT and technology jobs, former students applying for track changes via lower-skilled jobs. This pattern is likely linked to the two legal tracks existing for international students, where one variety is enabled by being recruited after graduation (and after 2014 also in a six-month period after graduation) and the other combines studies with part-time jobs before a track change.

All in all, this indicates that track changes have been facilitated by the openness of the labor migration policy in Sweden, in which the role given to individual employers is crucial. But the same system creates delegated dependencies by tying residence rights to temporary jobs and continued employment records. This will be explored next.

Dependency upon individual employers

The Swedish labor migration policy has been forwarded as producing power imbalances in favor of the employer in several previous studies (Thörnqvist & Woolfson, 2012; Calleman, 2015; Bonfanti, 2014). Existing research has for example highlighted overdependence upon employers and even exploitation, with references to migrants’ risk of losing residency rights after the withdrawal of work permits (Frödin & Kjellberg, 2018). Researchers from the broader migration literature have called attention to employer dependency or double precariousness of migrants working in low-paid sectors for legalization reasons or for those without proper legal documents (Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2020). Others, like Kubal (2009; 2013) and Datta et al. (2007) argue that there is a range between opportunism and exploitation involved, as migrants might instrumentally trade off job security for legal residency. My interviews with migrants who have experiences of track changes offer insight into how they inevitably also produce particularly precarious and dependent situations, as the employment offers leading to the work permits are temporary and not binding on employers. As Morteza was talking about his experiences of working as an asylum-seeker, he told several anecdotes of employers deriving financial benefits from the presence of migrants with insecure residency permits. Although he told me he personally had not been exposed to any mistreatment, other migrants he knew had, who were also in a similar situation trying to access a legal or more stable status. He especially mentioned a girl he knew, a working asylum-seeker who had got a job offer to work at a petrol pump from a close family member. After a period of working 12 h a day with very little salary, Morteza told me that she had had enough and confronted the family member. She lost the job, with unknown prospects of what to do. Morteza shared this story not only to comment on the insecurity and vulnerability of status changers like himself on the labor market, but to explain the fluid boundaries between helpers and exploiters, much like those in irregularity, in his own community. He explained:

The problem is among these people… who are economically weak, is that they have invested a lot themselves back home, I have not had these problems, but those companies who are weak, recently arrived… They jeopardize other people’s rights because they themselves are weak. It’s not exploitation, they themselves are living with difficulties. (2^nd April 2016)

Morteza envisioned social and psychological pressure and over-estimated expectations of success from back home, which, in his experiences, push individual employers into informality or employee-employer relations that skirt regulations. In a context of insecurity and dependence, even in the closest family circles, or should one say especially, exploitative situations occur in the breaches of the law. As he saw it, because of the employee’s dependence on the work permit, the employer has “(…) an advantage, I can even ask for more work from this person. Why do I do all of this? Well, because of my own weakness.” (2^ndApril 2016).

Interviewees who were formerly international students also talked about uncertain and unpredictable conditions involved in track changes through work—from a renewal to another or temporary statuses to permanent—even though they might have at some point done “smooth” track change from the educational channel to work permits and were legally resident in Sweden. Take Priya and her husband, both from Bangladesh, as an example. When I interviewed Priya in 2016, she had been waiting for months for a decision from the Migration Agency regarding the renewal of her work permit. She feared a rejection, aware of an error in in her employment track record with a previous employer who had provided only three out of four required forms of insurance. The Migration Agency had started to check if payroll and insurance requirements were met each month regardless of illness and other leaves of absence instead of including the total income for the period. The process which began in 2014 when legal restrictions were put in place, followed a decision by the Migration Supreme Court in which applications for extended work permits could only be approved if the requirements for work permits have been met during all previous permit periods. If a misapplication is detected, the burden falls on individual migrants, not employers—which is why Priya knew that the consequence in her case might be deportation. As Priya waited for a decision, not knowing if she and her family could stay here, she depicted how she was caught in a transient condition, which despite being legal, put her on a sort of probation period with restrictions on employment insurance such as sick leave repayments. These periods of probation, in which the future of her and her husband’s rights were reduced and their future claims for residency potentially at risk, occurred despite nearly a decade of switching between studying and working in Sweden. As a worker and after years of living in Sweden, Priya was still denied inclusion in the protection realms of Swedish law that are open to those with full membership - permanent residents and citizens. As another migrant who organized a demonstration in favor of temporary workers facing deportations expressed it, “We feel like prisoners who must just work to exist. We cannot travel. We don’t have much choice. We work, we pay tax to the state, however. We feel like chain gangs” (quote from the campaigners’ call for a demonstration in 2016 against deportations).

Deportability here is exposed in the ways in which migrants, with the prospect of permanent residency, might accept dodgy work-time conditions, lower salaries and so on - under the radar. In other cases, the smallest errors in formal applications produce deportability. If anything goes wrong, the burden of errors, potential unscrupulous actions or mistakes by employers, or simply precariousness itself, falls on the migrants who risk running out of options or be expelled. A former student shared an information letter to the Migration Agency in which he at the end of the letter posed rhetorical questions about the employers’ impunity when errors in the paper trails are detected. Before facing a rejection of a temporary permit post-track change, he questioned:

‘So, why the employers are not being punished for violating the law? The people who are being rejected are worried, stressed, and disappointed. After finishing their study life, they have spent the most valuable time in Sweden to develop and to be settle down. Now they can’t imagine starting and developing career again in a new place or environment. They are totally perplexed. Is it not against humanity? If thousands of immigrant workers can make delicious food, keep cleaning indoor and outdoor, serving the old and sick people as a nurse or doctors, building the accommodation, infrastructure, helping in finance, education, social and cultural activities; shouldn’t the Swede government or the authority also be with them if they are in need? (Informant from Bangladesh, in a letter to the Migration Agency, 2016)

Logically, there are differences between rejected asylum-seekers and international students with regards to deportability. Different resources and networks enable individual migrants to develop different ways to overcome deportability. Some hide, return, others, as we saw in the example of Priya, restart an employment record by for example by moving temporarily to neighboring countries. Also, we find differences in employment sectors to which their work permits are linked and the accompanying role of individual employers. Alongside fear of deportation, potential misuse might remain undetected in job sectors with less unionization and lack of collective agreements in the Swedish labor market (Frödin & Kjellberg, 2018). This means additional vulnerabilities and obstacles for track changes through low pay sectors, for example, which my material clearly points to. In the case files, workers in low-pay sectors to take up several jobs—as cleaners, restaurant workers or newspaper distributors—to reach the minimum level of 13,000 SEK required for track changes. Nevertheless, having several employers, too low a salary due to absence from work or having low-paid part-time jobs, disqualifies them for track changes. In the case files, part-time jobs pose significant hurdle for women applicants, who apply for a track change on basis of two (occasionally three) part-time jobs with several employers. The high level of rejections among applications from asylum to work channels is also noteworthy here. Eligibility to track changes is logically conditioned by migrants’ access to the formal labor market. Asylum-seekers have narrow chances to quality for track changes with regards to low employment rates as well as high level of rejections of applications presented in evaluations (OECD, 2011; SOU 2011, p. 28). Despite these differences, deportability is pertinent as long as there is temporariness involved and the parameters of presence is attached to work - irrespective of being a rejected asylum-seeker, former student, or part-time student. For example, in the ways in which permanent and legally stable residencies remain out of reach for migrants. Or when risks of legal sanctions in fear of deportation are coupled with elongated periods of temporariness and uncertainty. This is explained more in detail in the next section.

Temporariness, risks and uncertainties

In the previous sections, I have discussed examples of how experiences of deportability bind different categories of migrants together. I also noted additional vulnerabilities in low-pay sectors and in how different resources and networks enable individual migrants to develop different ways to overcome deportability. Some hide, return, others, as we saw in the example of Priya, restart an employment record by for example by moving temporarily to neighboring countries.

It is important to emphasize that the risk of deportation is exuberated for both rejected asylum-seekers and international students under stricter rules put in place since 2014 when the law was hardened to curb alleged misuse of the openness of the labor migration policy. Since then, all migrants with temporary permits risk not being able to renew their temporary work statuses or obtain permanent residency if they do not meet requirements related to insurance or salary during all the preceding years. The Swedish Migration Agency holds strictly to salary and insurance requirements without any regard to other circumstances, under the insignia of preventing exploitation. Whilst this sends clear messages to follow standards on the Swedish labor market, these rigorous evaluations enacted by the Migration Agency has at the same time produced a pitfall in reinforcing the migrants’ deportability (De Genova, 2002). As in the case of one woman applicant for track change in my material to whom a organizations had provided legal counseling, the risk of deportation is present on the basis of minor errors such as salary discrepancies between collective agreement and actual payments of as low as 9 SEK (1 USD). The specific legal amendments put in place to protect workers, have in this way actually expanded the grounds for deportation and have adverse consequences for track changes on the ground (cf. Gonzales & Sigona, 2018). Rejected asylum-seekers who need to show proof of correct employment records four months back and a year forward, and international students, even after they are granted status changes, are thus continuously subject to threat of deportation for relatively minor wrongdoings in their paper tails.

As no Swedish institution has formal responsibility for informing applicants about track changes, migrants are dependent upon the goodwill of employers, migrant networks or volunteer initiatives to help them to do the paperwork correctly and to comprehend what is needed from them in relation to different admission channels. One volunteer from civil society among my interviewees shared that her experience with the bureaucracy of spårbyten is characterized by unblocking claims, reissuing permits and a wide range of other seemingly impossible pursuits to bend the rules and help people to stay by virtue of a new experimental way. She described a situation where her organization was working around policies and laws to enable those who lack alternatives to pass through—in her words—’the eye of the needle’ (see also Calleman, 2015). Another organization worked mostly with irregular migrants, many of them Albanians and Iraqis, whose chances of being granted track changes were slim if not non-existent in her experience. The volunteers act as brokers between migrants and the Swedish bureaucracy, helping the former to fill in forms, make calls to officials, acquire insurances, verify identities, and providing legal advice on how to appeal ‘unlawful’ decisions. Participating in one meeting organized by a volunteer organization, I was informed of a person who had been working as a cleaner and contacted the organization to verify if his papers fulfilled the requirements for a track change. He presented all the papers to them and ensured that all the insurances and the salary were in order as this has been organized with the employer. He said, however, that he had not been able to retrieve the documents from the insurance company as they were unable to identify him in their digital system. The organization phoned the employer repeatedly and was eventually able to put the insurance certificates to be sent for a track change application. Without these certificates the application would have most likely been rejected by the Migration Agency and the migrant would have risked deportation. Interviewees retold several similar stories, reflecting upon the narrow scope of track changes in terms of an irrational or even unjust emphasis on how claims are made, rather than the basis of the claims. Or as explained by one of my interviewees, there is a meticulous bureaucratic alignment attached to track changes, which foregrounds “doing right throughout the process” rather than being right (my emphasis of her words), stratifying migrants with different backgrounds and possibilities.

Discussion: a cruel optimism?

This article has offered insights into different migrants whose pathways are, in one way or the other, marked by efforts to stay through temporary work in Sweden. How can deportability help explain their experiences, particularly considering that track changes help migrants to (re)claim the right to stay?

The openness of the Swedish polices creates opportunities for migrants, once present, to renew claims of residency rights. The article has shown that for migrants whose past residency claims are rejected, those who receive negative decisions to their attempts to renew permits, or seek to stay in Sweden after their studies, track changes offer ways to readmit claims as an alternative to not being deported or leaving the country. Track changes then open doors for those who would otherwise be forced to leave Sweden, be deported, or fall into or remain in irregularity. It brings these migrants closer to legal statuses that, if granted and preserved, can over time offer them a sanctuary or a place in which to develop personal or aspirations careers. This does not, however, manifest without ambiguities, which is where deportability enters the picture.

To begin with, some migrants, motivated by necessity rather than opportunity, stumble upon track change as a last resort when drifting in and out of statuses, or to combat irregularity. These include, for example, rejected asylum-seekers who apply for track changes when other openings are exhausted; rejected asylum-seekers who live in irregularity and try to self-regularize through work permits; women dependents who lose their temporary statuses after divorce; and migrants (including international students) ‘stuck’ in the borderlands between informality and formality working in low-paid jobs with little chance of being granted a track change, even when the time arrives when they actually can apply. For such migrants, the article has shown, pursuing change of “tracks” is associated with persistent risk of falling into a less secure situation or losing altogether the right to claim a legal status. But deportability is also pertinent for former international students, or those with more maneuverability in higher-skilled jobs. Even after granted track change, migrants remain in Kafkaesque paperwork as temporary workers, despite having worked in Sweden for years. Those who go through a track change process and must continuously apply and reapply, risk deportation for the smallest error: if they have earned slightly less money due to sickness or taking leave, if they are not paid the correct salary, if the employer neglects insurance, if they for other reasons lose the work permit, and so on. If we look at track changes in relation to deportability—a key finding comes into view. That, whilst the use of work permits as way to remain in Sweden is enabled in different ways by the openness and uniqueness track changes, this comes with a heavy price. This means that whilst the employer-driven system allows individual employers to open doors, the same openness also produces dependency and deportability, as migrants’ risk losing residency rights after the withdrawal of work permit. In this regard do these findings not differ substantially from other research that demonstrates ‘fluid zones of precarity’ for migrants at the intersection of migration status claims and temporary work on the labor market in other contexts (Basok et al., 2014; Landolt & Goldring, 2015). I see it as an agency sustained by what Berlant calls a cruel optimism (2011). The looming prospect of permanent residency not only carries nearly the same rights as citizenship, but it also promises to ultimately put an end to their deportability.

One fundamental implication that these insights bring forward points to a dark side of a proliferation of temporary and conditional residencies, at the expense of long-term and more secure permanent residencies which Sweden long was known for. As work-based conditionality gradually has become rule rather than exception through a paradigm shift in Swedish migration policy, more research will be needed on the links between deportability and temporary work for different non-citizen groups in Sweden.

In late 2023, the Swedish government announced a restructuring of labor migration system with a proposal to increase the minimum salary requirement from 13000 SEK per month (less than 1300 USD) to 26560 SEK per month (less than 2600 USD). This has some implications for the core arguments. If put in place, this proposal will surely produce a diminishing effect on track changes in low-skilled jobs. It is likely that some aspects of deportability attached to low-pay sectors discussed this article will shift and the role of individual employers will be modified. But with support from existing research on the consequences of merging asylum and work channels (see for example Bonizzoni & Artero, 2023), we can still consider deportability as significant for both rejected asylum-seekers and international students who pursue track changes in Sweden as long as the right of presence is conditioned upon temporary work.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express a sincere gratitude to all the informants and commentators who have shared their experiences, thoughts and time throughout the research project. I also want to thank Blanca Garcés-Mascareñas and Juan Carlos Triviño Salazar for their insightful comments and feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

The author reports there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 To access this data, I was granted permission by the Swedish Migration Agency to retrieve the case files under rules of confidentiality. We also, verbally and in written form, agreed on how to access the files and what information I would be sharing.

2 The sample was divided into three analytical categories (asylum to work, education to work and work to asylum) that I had gathered from my ongoing exploration were of interest (33 per type of track change). From the 99 applications, 21 case files were discounted from the examined sample (16 of them were children under 18 years of age and five were non-applicable). This left me with 25 former asylum-seeker applications, 31 former student applications and 22 reverse applications (from work to asylum), that is a total of (n = 78) examined case file applications.

3 Given the overall sensitivity and risks associated with research on “vulnerable groups” extra measures had to be taken to protect informants. To protect the well-being and safety of the research participants, I needed to make sure that the migrants, as far as possible, made informed decisions about contributing to the research. I provided oral or written information, and once they had agreed on an interview, I gave more detailed information, making sure they knew, as far as possible, what the study was about, what methods were being used as well as the purpose of the interview – including understanding that the final result would only be used for research purposes. I also explained that the interview was anonymous, tape-recorded (if that were the case), and that all raw data would be processed confidentially and protected from unauthorized persons. Before the interviews, I stressed that they had the right to the refuse to answer my questions, that they are entailed to share only information that they feel comfortable with and that they can interrupt the interview at any time. I applied measures of pseudonymization both when recording the data and in the ways in which I present the data. Regarding the interviews with stakeholders, I anticipated minimal or no risk of harm to the integrity of interviewees or cause pain, discomfort or other hazards in the long or short term, as most of these were public individuals or official experts. Yet, I chose to pseudonymize these interviews by keeping a partly anonymized affiliation code. I state for example organization, expert, trade union, governmental body, employer representative with date of the interview - while not revealing the names of the interviewed persons. The reasons for this grade of anonymity had to do with an appreciation from my side of the overall sensitivity of my research rather than a consideration of their individual safety.

4 To what Haug (2008) singles out as ‘components of migration motivation’ as size of family, age, gender I added descriptive labels such as information about job sector, entry mode, types and history of status changes, country of origin, first/last year of application, application status, marital status, town in Sweden etc. No sensitive information that could risk identification of individual migrants or employers was introduced into SPSS nor in any of my memos.