Waiting for housing: municipal practices of mobility control

ABSTRACT

In the wake of the increased number of people on the move who arrived in Sweden in 2015, more restrictive migration policies and welfare policies have been introduced and become increasingly intertwined. In this article, we examine the intersection between local housing policy and national migration policy. By looking at the implementation of a new law, the Settlement Act, which makes reception and accommodation of newly settled refugees mandatory for all municipalities in Sweden, we analyse municipal practices of mobility control, emphasising the waiting produced through the provision of temporary housing. Based on interviews, policy documents, reports and news media reporting, we analyse how two municipalities regulate conditions of stay through temporary access to housing and poor living conditions. Such practices involve processes of waiting and produce long periods of uncertainty, preventing migrants from being able to plan a future. This eventually affects the possibility for family reunification and permanent residency, which is conditioned by requirements such as stable housing and employment.

ABSTRAKT

Efter det ökade antalet människor på flykt som kom till Sverige under 2015, har restriktivare regler införts gällande migration och välfärd, två områden som även har blivit allt mer sammanlänkade. I denna artikel undersöker vi hur den lokala rättigheten till bostad och bosättning länkas samman med den nationella regleringen av migration. Genom att studera implementeringen av en ny lag, bosättningslagen, som gör mottagandet av nyanlända migranter obligatoriskt för alla kommuner, analyserar vi mobilitetskontrollerande praktiker, med fokus på den väntan som skapas genom tillfälliga bostadslösningar. Utifrån intervjuer, rapporter, policydokument och nyhetsrapportering analyserar vi hur två kommuner reglerar vistelsevillkoren i kommunen genom tillfällig tillgång till bostad och dåliga bostadsförhållanden. Sådana praktiker innebär processer av väntan och skapar långa perioder av osäkerhet, något som hindrar migranter från att kunna planera sin framtid. Detta påverkar i förlängningen även möjligheten till familjeåterförening och permanent uppehållstillstånd, något som är beroende av att den nyanlände finner en varaktig bostad och anställning.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugee settlement
• Swedish municipalities
• waiting
• mobility
• conditions of stay

NYCKELORD:

• Bosättning av nyanlända
• Svenska kommuner
• Väntan
• Mobilitet
• Vistelsevillkor

1. Introduction

Internal borders and indirect border controls have increasingly become mechanisms for governing migrant mobility within nation states (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Local authorities often play an important role in such bordering practices by regulating access to basic public services such as health care or housing (Nordling & Persdotter, 2021; Sager et al., 2016). In this article, we study one local form of mobility control, namely temporary access to services. Focusing on temporary access to housing at a local level in Sweden, we analyse the municipal regulations on housing as a site of waiting: persons who are granted asylum (hereinafter: newly settled refugees) are delayed or hindered in the process of starting a life in a municipality where they have begun to settle down after being granted asylum. In this context, we draw on theories on local control of mobility that focuses on the regulation of conditions of stay (Chan, 2014; Park, 2019) as well as on waiting as a particular dimension of time that affects the boundaries of access to rights (Anderson, 2019; Khosravi, 2021).

Swedish municipalities are responsible for organising welfare services such as schooling, social services and elderly care, as well as physical planning and housing provision. Policies and practices regulating access to welfare services can therefore differ for migrants with the same legal status according to which municipality they reside in. The Settlement Act (SFS 2016:38) stipulates that all Swedish municipalities are legally compelled to accommodate newly settled refugees. Since the law does not specify for how long the municipalities are to offer housing, nor the quality of the housing, there has been a wide variation in municipal implementation of the Act (Grange & Björling, 2020). Municipal discretion regarding this issue has direct consequences for migrants’ access to housing and other social rights, which in some cases extend to their possibilities to attain a permanent residence permit or reunite with their families. For this reason, we argue that access to housing on a local level is an increasingly important site to study in order to understand various dimensions of how migrants are temporally controlled: when embarking on life in a new country, when building a future, when trying to access basic social rights.

Our aim is to analyse local practices of mobility control and imposed waiting in relation to the Settlement Act in two municipalities. Both these municipalities create conditions that to different extent make it difficult for newly settled refugees to stay within their territories. Short-term housing contracts, sometimes with the housing in poor conditions, are used to avoid a more permanent housing responsibility, which indicates that municipal solutions are viewed as temporary while waiting for something permanent – preferably elsewhere. Through interviews with local politicians, municipal employees and civil society actors as well as a study of policy documents, reports and news media coverage on the housing situation of newly settled refugees in two municipalities, we analyse how the Settlement Act is put into practice.

The article is structured as follows: After giving an overview of the asylum policy changes post-2015 and the Settlement Act introduced in 2016, we present our method followed by a summary of the regulation of local conditions of stay and imposed waiting as central theoretical concepts. We then present how the Settlement Act has been put into practice in the two municipalities and analyse municipal practices that in a variety of ways regulate the conditions and length of stay in the municipality.

2. Contextualising the intersection of national migration policies and local housing policies

As a response to the Swedish state’s perceived refugee and reception ‘crisis’ of 2015, more restrictive migration policies and welfare policies have been introduced, which have become increasingly intertwined. In 2016, Sweden implemented a temporary restrictive migration law (SFS 2016:752), which was made permanent with minor changes in the Aliens Act in 2021 (SFS 2005:716). The former legislation accorded permanent residence permits to people being granted asylum, as well as to their partners and children. Now temporary residence permits of either 13 months or three years are applied as a general rule, only refugees resettled through the UNHCR are exempted and allowed permanent residency. Otherwise, permanent residency can be given only after three years of temporary permits and is conditional on an income requirement as well as a ‘well-behaved lifestyle’, which means no criminal record or suspicion of crime. Furthermore, language skills and knowledge about Swedish society as yet another condition for the attainment of permanent residency and citizenship is currently being processed (SOU, 2020:54). Family reunification has also been severely restricted by the introduction of income and housing standard requirements for those applying to reunite with their families. The maintenance requirement entails a regular work-related income and the level of income necessary depends on how large the person's family is and how high the housing costs are. The housing requirement specifies a home of sufficient size and standard for the family: a one-room flat for a couple and an extra room for every two children (Swedish Migration Agency, 2021). For families with several children, it becomes extremely difficult to live up to the requirements, since the income and size of housing needed increases. With the introduction of such a conditioned residence permit system, local policies on refugee reception and housing have become important in relation to migration policy.

2.1. Refugee reception: the introduction of the Settlement Act

The responsibility to provide housing for newly settled refugees is divided between the state and the municipalities. The state-run Swedish Migration Agency is responsible for providing housing for families and adults during the asylum process, unless they choose to arrange housing on their own account (self-settlement). Those who are granted a residence permit and have lived in the Migration Agency’s reception facilities during the asylum process, as well as refugees resettled in Sweden through the UNHCR, can get help to settle in a municipality through the Settlement Act (SFS 2016:38).¹

The Settlement Act came into force in March 2016 and made reception and accommodation of newly settled refugees mandatory for all municipalities. Prior to the Settlement Act, reception of newly settled refugees was voluntary, and municipalities signed individual agreements to accommodate a certain number of migrants. Only some municipalities signed these agreements, which resulted in a shortage of reception possibilities. The ambition of the new law was to divide the responsibility of reception more equally among all municipalities and to give newly settled refugees better possibilities to integrate by allocating them to municipalities with good labour market conditions (Govt. Bill, 2015/16:54). The local housing supply, however, is not considered and has become one of the main issues used by municipalities to oppose refugee reception (Grange & Björling, 2020). The number of resettled persons allocated through the Settlement Act to each municipality is decided according to population, labour market prospects, reception of self-settled migrants, reception of unaccompanied children, and the number of newly settled refugees already living in the municipality. Each municipality is economically compensated for the reception during two years and the state also provides for the newly settled refugees for about two years through the ‘introduction benefit’.

2.2. Municipal housing policies and the (temporary) right to housing

The right to housing is stated in the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as several binding international treaties. According to the Swedish law regulating municipal housing responsibilities (SFS 2000:1383), each municipality is obliged to plan for housing provision for everyone in the municipality, including socially disadvantaged groups. However, in practice municipalities can disregard their own plans and individuals cannot claim a right to housing. While most municipalities have left the responsibility for housing provision to private actors, a central tool for the municipalities in this context is the public housing companies. These companies are intended to have an integrative function in that the housing should be accessible to everyone but they are still allowed to set limits on the level and type of income. This means that public housing companies can refuse the introduction benefit paid to newly settled refugees as a valid income. Today public housing companies comprise only about 15 percent of dwellings, the largest share of housing being owner-occupied (Grundström & Molina, 2016; Sahlin, 2020). Buying an apartment is not an option for economically weak households, and the proportion of rental apartments differs among municipalities, which affects the possibilities to enter the housing market (Listerborn et al., 2020). Additionally, on the rental market there are several obstacles, such as insufficient supply of rental apartments with reasonable rent, long waiting lists, and high income requirements from landlords. This means that socially disadvantaged groups might in practice be pushed out of receiving housing (Baeten & Listerborn, 2020).

With the introduction of the Settlement Act, all municipalities must be prepared to receive newly settled refugees and plan the housing supply accordingly (SOU, 2018, p. 35). However, in 2020, two out of three municipalities reported a shortage of housing for newly settled refugees (Boverket, 2021). In the Bill preparatory to the Settlement Act, it is stated that ‘[a] starting point for the housing policy is that housing is a social right. The goal is to create conditions for everyone to live in good housing at a reasonable cost. The realisation of this objective presupposes active efforts by the municipalities’ (Govt. Bill, 2015/16:54, p. 17). However, the law does not state what type of housing is intended or for how long. Due to this legal vagueness, in the process of implementation, a two-year limit on housing contracts has been used by several municipalities, by connecting their housing responsibility to the ‘introduction period’ of two years. During this period newly settled refugees receive the introduction benefit while participating in an introduction programme run by the Swedish Public Employment Service. The aim of the programme is to learn Swedish and find a job as quickly as possible in order to manage their own livelihood. Some municipalities argue that they risk bearing increased costs for housing and social assistance after this two-year introduction period when state funding ceases – both the introduction benefit paid to the newly settled refugees as well as the reception compensation to the municipalities. Another argument is that other groups in need of support would be disadvantaged if newly settled refugees were to be offered permanent housing (Grange & Björling, 2020). This two-year limit on housing contracts, however, is a deviation from regular renting policies and practices that are usually permanent in both public and private rental housing. Temporary contracts are used only when people sublet their private homes, which requires permission from landlords, or when the social services sublet flats to homeless people under certain conditions.

About 30 percent of the 230 municipalities that have accommodated refugees through the Settlement Act – predominantly those located in regions around larger cities with significantly better labour market conditions – have restricted the housing contracts to two years, in some cases with means-tested possibilities for extension (Boverket, 2021). Around 65 percent of the municipalities have instead chosen to provide permanent contracts, either immediately or over time if the tenants can pay the rent, arguing that this facilitates integration. Some municipalities give permanent contracts to families with children by referring to the Convention of the Rights of the Child, while single adults are given temporary contracts for up to five years (Länsstyrelsen, 2020). In the country as a whole, a quarter of all the newly settled refugees assigned to a municipality during 2018–2019 were accommodated in municipalities that offered temporary contracts (Ibid.).

The local discretion on implementation, combined with vague legislation that remains open to interpretation, has created a situation where access to housing differs depending on which municipality newly arrived refugees are assigned to. Thus, the Settlement Act and municipal settlement have become highly relevant in relation to the principle of maintenance and housing requirements tied to residency and family reunification introduced in the migration policies of 2016 and 2021.

3. A case study: two municipalities used as examples

Based on interviews with local politicians, municipal employees and civil society actors, as well as policy documents, reports and news media coverage on the housing situation of newly settled refugees, we analyse how the Settlement Act is put into practice. We have chosen to analyse two municipalities, one located in southern Sweden (Municipality S) and one in the more northern capital region (Municipality N). The municipalities are selected due to their practices of restricting access to housing. As we will elaborate below, they have used a variety of practices in relation to the Settlement Act. However, rather than comparing the municipalities, we investigate different forms of mobility control through the means of temporary housing. The motivation behind the anonymisation of municipalities is to uphold the confidentiality of our informants but is also intended to indicate for the reader that the two cases should be viewed as examples of the practices studied, rather than as a study of specific municipalities.

In order to gain insight into the practical implementation of the Settlement Act, six interviews were carried out online. At each location we interviewed one local politician au fait with the process of implementation of the Settlement Act, one municipal employee working (or having recently worked) practically with the Settlement Act, and one civil society representative supporting those settled in the municipality. The interviews were complemented by e-mail correspondence with the Head of Department responsible for implementation in Municipality S and more informal conversations with a neighbourhood organisation in Municipality N. Policy documents and public information about the Settlement Act were analysed in order to explore how the two municipalities approached the Act and put it into practice. Furthermore, news media reporting was used as a way to understand how the reception of newly settled refugees was debated in public.

4. Local bordering practices: regulating conditions of stay

Our approach follows recent literature within critical border studies paying attention to the bordering practices within states that treat the residence permit system as an extension of borders that follow migrants into the national space through legal status (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013). Less attention, however, has been given to the local variations of access to rights for migrants with the same legal status. This is why we underline the need to explore municipal practices in relation to access to housing, by specifically looking at conditions of stay, with emphasis on the governing of time.

At the municipal level, compared to the national, other measures of controlling mobility of people are enforced. For example, a municipality cannot control or condition who enters its territory, which is why conditions of stay, rather than conditions of entry, have been centred as a way to locally control mobility (Anderson, 2017; Persdotter, 2019). One example of this is what has been termed ‘self-deportation policies’; policies that seek to ‘make individuals into agents of the state’s goal of their removal by making their lives unbearable’ (Park, 2019, p. 1882). Self-deportation is more commonly known as a legislative strategy in the US, which seeks to control and prevent migration of undocumented people into a state or locality by discriminating treatment – for example by outlawing undocumented persons from renting apartments, prohibiting transportation of undocumented people or denying them welfare benefits (Chan, 2014). Similarly, in a British context, a ‘hostile environment’ for undocumented migrants has been announced as a policy aim (Goodfellow, 2019). In the Swedish context, policies that indirectly encourage ‘voluntary return’ of irregularised migrants and ‘vulnerable EU citizens’ have been studied (Nordling & Persdotter, 2021; Persdotter, 2019). However, such policies do not give an explicit intention to encourage self-deportation as in the US and British contexts.

In this article, we draw on these theorisations in relation to municipal practices of access to housing and settlement through the Settlement Act that target newly settled refugees. We argue that the municipalities attempt to control their territories by regulating ‘conditions of stay’, even though the intentions to create a ‘hostile environment’ for newly settled refugees is not articulated. In this way, municipal practices, not least by emphasising temporary and poor housing solutions, contribute to creating a local environment that encourages people to leave the municipality.

We pay special attention to time and waiting as factors conditioning the settlement of newly settled refugees. Temporal aspects have been studied in relation to a range of phenomena, not least to explore asylum processes, experiences of undocumentedness and different precarised groups (Eule et al., 2019; Hasselberg, 2016; Jacobsen et al., 2020; Lilja et al., 2018). We argue that foregrounding time as a boundary around the access to rights (Anderson, 2019) can help us to further understand the functioning of immigration controls and welfare benefits at a local level. Anderson (2019) takes as examples temporal limitations on residence and the qualifying periods for labour migrants, where the length of employment or residence conditions access to the welfare state, making migrants wait for years before they can claim certain rights. Such long periods of uncertainty and temporariness make it difficult to plan for the future, which creates a situation of being-in-waiting (Eule et al., 2019).

Khosravi (2021, p. 14) describes waiting as a ‘particular experience of time’ that is inescapable. Referring to Bourdieu (2000, as cited in Khosravi, 2021, p. 14), he ties waiting to power: ‘to keep people waiting, without ruining their hope, is an exercise of power over other people’s time’. In this study we focus on this institutional level of making people wait, rather than on experiences of waiting. We see imposed waiting as a tool for mobility control directly and indirectly affecting the conditions of stay through the use of temporary services in relation to housing. We also see waiting as an outcome where municipal housing based on temporariness implies waiting for more permanent and stable solutions. Waiting in this sense can be understood in relation to people’s need for stability and control over their lives necessary to fulfil integration requirements that condition permanent residency and family reunification.

Furthermore, waiting is not a neutral but a highly political condition affected by gender, citizenship, race and class (Khosravi, 2021), which means that the consequences of institutional manipulation of people’s time differ. As Cohen (2018) argues, the idea that everyone has the same amount of time, and therefore the same opportunity, renders invisible the fact that people are differentially situated. In our case this is manifested at the intersection of migration policy and local housing policy and the specific consequences that temporary services risk having on newly settled refugees, with the potential effect of making newly settled refugees leave the municipality and eventually the state.

5. Municipal regulations on housing as a site of protracted waiting

The municipalities analysed in this article are located in the northern Stockholm region (Municipality N) and the southern region of Scania (Municipality S) and have between 25,000 and 50,000 inhabitants. The accommodation of about 100 newly settled refugees per year is new to both municipalities, since neither of them had chosen to actively accommodate newly settled refugees before the Settlement Act was introduced.

Although many municipalities do choose to offer permanent housing, temporary housing contracts are by no means unique to the two municipalities in our study. The two-year limitation is based on a temporal interpretation of the meaning of ‘temporary housing’ stated in the Bill preparatory to the Settlement Act (Govt. Bill, 2015/16:54, p. 18). The legal possibility for such a temporal reduction of responsibility was confirmed by the Administrative Court in March 2018 (Court Case 25142-17) and was later established by the Administrative Court of Appeal in February 2019 (Court Case 4155-18). An alternative interpretation of ‘temporary housing’, however, refers to the type of housing offered, such as module housing or barracks, as initial temporary housing solutions for municipalities that cannot offer first-hand rental contracts on the regular housing market as an immediate solution. Making a temporal legal interpretation has opened possibilities to reduce the municipal housing responsibility, creating a situation where newly settled refugees are put in a position of waiting for permanent housing.

Next, we look at the ways in which both municipalities in this study regulate conditions of stay for newly settled refugees. Even though their practices differ in some ways, making people wait is used both as an indirect means to encourage people to leave the municipality, by creating temporary solutions, and as a consequence of municipal mobility control where people are made to wait to settle down and form a future.

5.1. Municipality S: ‘the housing solutions that were squeezed out are not dignified and decent’

Municipality S was brought to attention in the public debate in 2016 and 2017, as its initial response to the Settlement Act was to delay the reception of the newly settled refugees assigned to the municipality, by simply not providing housing solutions (SVT, 2017). After waiting a year for the municipality to bring about solutions, the Migration Agency decided to send a group of newly settled refugees directly to the City Hall in order to force the municipality to accommodate them (Magnusson, 2018). The ruling centre-right majority (later replaced by a right/extreme right-wing majority in 2018), was openly against the implementation of the Settlement Act, referring to high costs and lack of housing (Sydsvenskan, 2017). According to our informants, various housing solutions and initiatives proposed by the coordinators working with reception in the municipality were turned down, something that they interpreted as an intent to send a signal to the government by showing poor and temporary solutions as the only alternative (Interviews, S1; S2; S3). Instead, when the Migration Agency finally forced the municipality to take action, temporary housing solutions were arranged by putting caravans near a dumpster area, located outside of the main city, as well as offering accommodation in repurposed horseboxes. As expressed by a civil society representative: ‘The housing solutions that were squeezed out are not dignified and decent’ (Interview, S3). These solutions were predominantly intended for single men, while families with children at least partly got access to more stable housing in the municipality (although for no longer than two years) or were placed in hostels in neighbouring municipalities (Magnusson, 2018; Interview, S2). However, some of the men perceived as ‘single’ actually had families elsewhere, in other parts of the world or in other Swedish municipalities.

They felt that they had lost so much time, first waiting for the Swedish Migration Agency to get a place of settlement in the first place, then waiting in the asylum reception centre seeing people moving out who had received municipal settlement long after they had. […] Then ending up in this caravan, aware of the requirements to be able to bring your family here: get an extended residence permit, learn Swedish, get a job, etc. They felt that their prospects were very, very bad. […] Feeling that ‘“this is it”, what I am being offered’, while knowing how difficult it is to find housing if you do not have a job. (Interview, S1).

With this practice the municipality created a situation of prolonged waiting deeply affecting people’s possibilities to plan for a future. Poor and temporary housing solutions in these cases severely affected their chances of settlement and made reunification with their families impossible, as the housing conditions offered did not meet the requirements for family reunification.

Municipality S revised its local housing strategy in 2019, introducing a stronger focus on individual responsibilities concerning housing (see Sahlin, 2020). A housing information officer whose role is to support the settled refugees in their search for housing was hired in 2018, and a strong discourse on newly settled refugees’ responsibilities is also expressed in the so-called ‘duty of integration’, which was introduced in municipal policy in 2019 (Municipality S, Local Integration Plan). A list of conditions for the individual was stated, which among other things included to ‘look for and find housing’ (Ibid., p. 4). When asked what this duty to find housing entailed, the Head of Department replied:

The individual must take responsibility for actively searching for housing. Immediately upon arrival, the individual receives clear information that only a time-limited contract will be offered and that it is the individual’s responsibility to find a solution to their housing situation. […] If the person has not found their own housing solution when the time-limited contract expires, the person will become homeless (Municipality S, E-mail correspondence).

The public housing company was sold in 2012, which resulted in very few apartments being available for public housing and the municipality claims to have few prospects for providing new housing solutions within its own production (Magnusson, 2018; Municipality S, Local Housing Strategy). This points to a general unwillingness to welcome socially disadvantaged groups, including newly settled refugees:

There is a tendency to put the responsibility for socially disadvantaged groups on other municipalities. If you become homeless and cannot afford to live here you are supposed to move somewhere else […] They have also built away the problem, there are no rental apartments. They invest in residential areas and weaker groups cannot afford to settle down here (Interview, S3).

We understand this as a local form of ‘hostility’ towards newly settled refugees as well as other socially disadvantaged groups, creating conditions that make it difficult for certain people to stay in the municipality (compare Baeten & Listerborn, 2020). Thus, placing newly settled refugees in other municipalities has been a way to solve the ‘housing problem’. Municipality S has even gone to court in order to place the legal responsibility for a newly settled family onto another municipality, in which the family had been accommodated until the two years expired. After the family had been sent back and forth between the municipalities, the ‘other municipality’ provided the family with emergency shelter for a few days at a time, over the course of several months, waiting for the court to decide on the matter (SVT, 2020). In May 2020, the Administrative Court of Appeal (Court Case 593-20), by referring to the Social Services Act, ruled that the family should apply for social assistance in the ‘other municipality’, due to the family’s stronger connection to that place of residence. Later, however, the Supreme Administrative Court instead ruled in favour of the ‘other municipality’, stating that it was Municipality S that was responsible for the family (HFD 2021 ref. 46). The uncertainty of how the law should be applied has hence been used by the municipality as a means to avoid responsibility, with an imposed waiting as a result for the individual.

5.2. Municipality N: initially softer, ending up evicting families

Municipality N, led by a centre-right-wing majority when the Settlement Act was introduced, had a less openly ‘hostile’ approach compared to Municipality S, at least initially. Newly settled refugees were accommodated from the beginning, mainly through public housing solutions. However, in November 2016, Municipality N decided to introduce a two-year limitation on housing contracts. Municipality N was thus one of the first municipalities to argue for a minimum housing responsibility, by making the individual responsible for their possibilities to remain in the municipality:

The municipality provides housing during the introduction period, so-called introduction housing. Meanwhile, the newly settled refugees get support to apply for housing, to get on the waiting list, etc. After the two-year introduction period, it is up to the individual to manage their housing within or outside of the municipality. In this way, the municipality fulfils its commitment to the Settlement Act, and at the same time maintains [the individual's] personal responsibility and requires them to fulfil their part. (Municipality N, Local Policy on the Settlement Act).

Accordingly, practices to assist people in what the municipality perceives as an individual responsibility to find housing have been introduced. ‘Housing school’ and ‘housing advice’, where people get support on how to ‘actively search for housing’, are offered weekly at the municipality’s reception centre, and workshops are given ‘to increase their possibilities to act strategically in their search for housing’ (Municipality N, Memo). The main argument behind the two-year limitation is ‘equal treatment’ in terms of access to housing for everyone in the municipality, since residents have been complaining about being treated unfairly when newly settled refugees, without having been on the waiting list, get speedy access to housing (Interviews, N1; N2). Our informant working directly with the people resettled in the municipality explained that the housing situation became the main concern for those settled in Municipality N after the introduction of the two-year limit at the end of 2016, since they were made to wait for permanent housing solutions that lay in an uncertain future, affecting several aspects of their lives:

The requirements are very high. To complete language studies, find a job, it is impossible to do it within two years. It creates stress: as soon as you move in you have to start thinking about moving out; it becomes impossible to focus. The housing situation is very difficult; you cannot find housing through the regular waiting list. […] ‘Housing school’ is offered, but that is for future solutions (Interview, N1).

The team working in the municipality to support those settled had raised concerns to the local politicians about the severe difficulties of time-limited contracts, but received no response until after the general elections in 2018 (Interview, N1). The new political majority, a coalition led by the Social Democrats, now gave families with children and refugees resettled through the UNHCR a two year extension of their housing contracts. This solution was intended also to apply to ‘single adults’ with special reasons to stay in the municipality, but very few have been given extensions due to the strict requirements. One person who was about to finish his language studies and two women who were pregnant and soon to give birth got extensions, while a woman waiting to be able to reunite with her husband and daughter was denied since reunification was not going to happen in the next couple of months. As put by our informant: ‘The grounds for extension were a compromise’ (Interview, N1).

Those who were settled in the municipality in 2016, before the two-year limit was decided, thought they were given permanent leases. Some of them, for lack of other options, have therefore refused to leave and claimed that they should have a right to stay (Interview, N3; Mitt i, 2018). The municipality had sent letters threatening them with eviction before the election in 2018, but the process was put on pause by the new political majority, creating hope to be able to stay. However, when people still remained after their contracts expired, the eviction processes were reinitiated. As of February 2021, a total of 17 households (including 5 households with children) had received eviction notifications by letter and another 15 households (including 4 households with children) had been taken to court (Municipality N, Memo). While the majority have left the municipality, a neighbourhood organisation has organised support to the newly settled refugees trying to fight the evictions, by providing access to community lawyers and an arena for self-organisation. Despite these eviction processes happening in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, the municipality has refused to stop the evictions, arguing that ‘there are no signs that it is more difficult to find housing during the pandemic’ (Interview, N2). In response to the municipality’s tenacity, the neighbourhood organisation has been trying to assist those at risk of immediate eviction to find a place to stay (Interview, N3; Arbetaren, 2020).

Aware of the difficulty in finding housing within the municipality, Municipality N actively encourages newly settled refugees to accept housing in other municipalities as a way to solve the situation once the contracts expire (Interview, N1). If they turn down such an offer – which often entails moving far away to a municipality with poor labour market prospects – the municipality will no longer assist the person. Since the situation of the housing market is generally less strained in municipalities with poorer economic and labour market conditions, it is more common that people who are encouraged by their home municipality to leave end up in municipalities where job opportunities are scarce (Statskontoret, 2020). Such practices, used by both the municipalities analysed in this study, lead to further difficulties for newly settled refugees to enter the labour market and become self-sufficient, which puts people in situations of protracted waiting for permanent residency and settlement.

5.3. Summing up the two examples

By regulating the conditions of stay (Park, 2019), we argue that both municipalities, although through different means and with different approaches, are creating conditions that make people leave. Offering only temporary housing contracts and poor housing solutions, as well as going to court in order to evict people, not only demonstrates an unwillingness to accommodate these people, but also has far-reaching consequences for people's possibilities to concentrate on language studies and find a job. Both municipalities have made a distinction between families and those perceived as ‘single adults’ for whom the duration of contracts has been shorter and housing standards poorer. Newly settled refugees waiting to reunite with their families are thus stuck in a ‘Catch 22’ situation where the poor and temporary housing conditions prevent them from reunification and their status as ‘single’ prevents them from qualifying for more stable housing solutions from the municipality. Delaying and obstructing possibilities to become self-sufficient through employment, combined with poor housing conditions, also affects the legal right to remain. This creates situations where people are made to wait for possibilities to settle down and to plan a future. At the same time, ironically enough, people’s time is filled with a range of integration activities and demands. As noted by Jacobsen et al. (2020), waiting is not a passive condition.

Further, we suggest that the practices related to the temporal limitation on housing developed by both municipalities in response to the Settlement Act have transformed the intended right to housing into an integration goal to be fulfilled by the newly settled refugees. By placing the responsibility onto the individual, structural problems in the housing market are ignored. The newly settled refugee who lacks housing after the two years have passed is thus constructed as a person who has failed the integration requirements and therefore is individually responsible for their situation of precarious housing or homelessness. Time-limited contracts combined with the introduction of ‘support activities’ that are designed for future solutions function as forms of indirect mobility control, making it the individual's responsibility to be able to stay in the municipality.

The municipalities have similar approaches regarding the temporal limitation on leases, but their rhetoric on this issue differs: while Municipality S is more openly reluctant to receive newly settled refugees, Municipality N instead argues for ‘equal treatment’. However, the idea of equality and individual responsibility does not take into account that time is not the same for everyone (Cohen, 2018). In the case of newly settled refugees, who have had little opportunity to access waiting lists and, as may be supposed, have only a small network in the new setting, the demand for ‘equal treatment’ misses the intention of the Settlement Act (guaranteeing housing and promoting integration) as well as the actual situation for newly settled refugees.

The intersection of restrictive migration policies and shortage of housing generates forms of waiting that have far reaching consequences for newly settled refugees specifically. Rather than facilitating establishment and integration, which is both the aim of the Settlement Act and required through the introduction programmes, newly settled refugees are made to keep on moving, waiting for permanent solutions, and are thus prevented from settling down.

6. Conclusions

In this article, we have analysed two examples where municipalities restrict access to housing for newly settled refugees. Both municipalities affect the conditions of stay, for example by providing poor housing or threatening people who are given short-term contracts with eviction. They are making people wait at the doorstep of the municipality by not providing housing solutions and/or making the municipal housing responsibility temporary for those settled on their territory. Furthermore, the temporal manoeuvre has brought with it new routines and practices that displace the housing responsibility onto the individual. Instead of a right to housing intended by the Settlement Act, finding housing has been made into an integration goal to be fulfilled within two years by the newly settled refugee. By encouraging and assisting people to leave to find housing in other municipalities and by directly accommodating newly settled refugees outside of their municipal borders, the housing responsibility is also redirected to other municipalities.

We argue that, by introducing such practices, the municipalities use waiting as an indirect strategy of mobility control, as these practices imply temporary solutions. This temporariness puts people’s lives ‘on hold’, as they are made to wait for a permanent solution that can provide stability and give them possibilities to settle down – to form a future.

Regulating local conditions of stay through the use of temporary solutions that produce a state of ‘waiting for the permanent’ is not uniquely applied to newly settled refugees; there are, for example, many similarities with other homeless and/or precarised groups (Sahlin, 2020; Samzelius, 2020). However, people are differently situated, which means that time affects individuals differently (Cohen, 2018; Khosravi, 2021). For newly settled refugees, the local practices of temporariness – that displace the housing responsibility intended by the Settlement Act – intersect with the 2016 and 2021 asylum policies based on temporary residency and maintenance requirements for family reunification. By municipalities creating insecure housing situations, newly settled refugees are put in a state of being-in-waiting; delayed, hindered, or prevented from learning the language and obtaining employment necessary for permanent residency and eventual attainment of citizenship. Their right to family life is also put on hold, since poor and short-term housing solutions offered by the municipalities do not meet the housing standards required for family reunification. The waiting for permanency produced by temporary housing solutions at a local level is therefore closely related to the overall mobility of newly settled refugees, exposing them to protracted waiting in precarious situations.

7.1. Quoted municipal material

7.1.1. Interviews and correspondence

N1, Interview with municipal employee, March 3, 2021.

N2, Interview with local politician, February 18, 2021.

N3, Interview with civil society representative, September 18, 2020.

S1, Interview with municipal employee, January 20, 2021.

S2, Interview with local politician, February 19, 2021.

S3, Interview with civil society representative, March 3, 2021.

Municipality S, E-mail correspondence, Head of Department, February 15, 2021.

7.1.2. Policy documents

Municipality N, Local Policy on the Settlement Act, dnr 0160/2016.

Municipality N, memo, social welfare and labour market committee, February 22, 2021.

Municipality S, Local Integration Plan, revised 2019.

Municipality S, Local Housing Strategy, revised 2019.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Sabine Gruber, Mahmoud Keshavarz, Anna Lundberg and Maria Persdotter for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz

Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz is PhD Candidate in Welfare Law, at the Department of Culture and Society, Linköping University. Her research focuses on municipal practices of welfare regulation as mechanisms of border control.

Vanna Nordling

Vanna Nordling is associate senior lecturer in social work, at the Department of social work, Malmö University. In her research she focuses on migration, citizenship and local control of mobility.

Notes

1 We focus on policies and practices related to adults and families who are included under the Settlement Act, which means that migrants under self-settlement regulations and unaccompanied children are outside of the scope of this article.