Collectivity in waiting: transnational experiences in Swedish family reunification

ABSTRACT

Despite notable bodies of literature on waiting in migration, on the importance of families in migrants’ decision-making and on transnational family life, the intersection of waiting as a collective experience remains largely unexplored. This study explores the added value of a collective lens on waiting through the case of family reunification in Sweden. With a qualitative method including semi-structured joint interviews, three couples’ reunification experiences depict waiting within student migration, refugee migration, for Swedish citizens and their respective partners. The interviews were chosen from a larger research material and analysed thematically with concepts from transnational family studies. Together, they show that collectivity may expand our understanding of waiting. As conditioned by Swedish welfare state, families’ caregiving practices were affected by prolonged waiting caused by parallel bureaucratic processes, while uncertain time frames and maintenance requirements undermined the couples’ own ability to plan, prompting both activity and passivity among those in waiting. As a lived experience, collectivity added mutual commitment, delegation of care, emotional support, and care practices as important roles in waiting.

ABSTRAKT

Trots en betydande mängd litteratur om väntan i migration, om familjens betydelse för beslutet att migrera och om transnationellt familjeliv är mötet mellan de tre, väntan som en kollektiv upplevelse, till stor del outforskad. Denna studie undersöker vad ett kollektivt perspektiv på väntan kan tillföra genom att titta på familjeåterförening till Sverige. Genom en kvalitativ metod med semistrukturerade parintervjuer skildras tre pars erfarenheter av väntan på återförening inom studentinvandring, flyktinginvandring, för svenska medborgare och deras respektive partners. Intervjuerna valdes ur ett större forskningsmaterial och analyserades tematiskt med begrepp ur transnationella familjestudier. Tillsammans visar de att kollektivitet kan bredda vår förståelse av väntan. Familjernas omsorgspraktiker påverkades av den utdragna väntan, orsakad av parallella byråkratiska processer som villkorades av den svenska välfärdsstaten. Samtidigt underminerade osäkra tidsangivelser och försörjningskrav parens egen förmåga att planera. Detta ledde både till aktivitet och passivitet bland de väntande. Som levd erfarenhet synliggjorde kollektivitet ömsesidiga förpliktelser, delegation av omsorg, känslomässigt stöd och omsorgsarbete som viktiga komponenter i väntan.

KEYWORDS:

• Collective waiting
• family reunification
• Sweden
• transnational families
• migration regimes

NYCKELORD:

• kollektiv väntan
• familjeåterförening
• Sverige
• transnationella familjer
• migrationsregim

Introduction

Studies on waiting in migration dominantly focus on individual experiences of forced or irregular migration, and how regulatory bodies such as migration regimes of welfare states condition their wait (e.g. Bélanger & Candiz, 2020; Brekke, 2004; Rotter, 2016). Highlighting this relationship between individuals and structures is fruitful to identify the unequal distribution of waiting in society (Schwartz, 1974) and the ways in which the powers of waiting (Bourdieu, 2000) are manifested through institutions and policy practice. Nonetheless, solely focusing on individual experiences has two important pitfalls. When analysed as singular cases or used as representative cases of larger groups, it risks omitting the interconnectedness and dependency within smaller groups or networks during the waiting experience. Secondly, analyses based on individual experiences risk obscuring how national welfare state policies aimed at residents of the country have spillover effects on those living beyond its borders. Using the case of waiting for family reunification in Sweden, this article joins the fields of waiting in migration with transnational family studies, aiming to highlight instances where a collective rather than individual focus may enrich our understanding of waiting as a lived experience framed by the Swedish welfare state.

Linking waiting in migration with transnational family studies

The scarcity of attention to collectives such as families in the studies of migration and waiting is quite surprising. Migration scholars have long acknowledged the role of households and social networks in migration decisions and integration trajectories (Massey et al., 1993) and a fundamental assumption in transnational family studies is that a ‘sense of collectivity and kinship’ (Baldassar et al., 2007, p. 13) is maintained even while families live separated across borders. Moreover, studies on forced family separation have drawn attention to their negative consequences for parents (Leinonen & Pellander, 2020; Mangrio et al., 2020) and children (Stange & Stark, 2019).

In transnational family studies, time or temporality as elements of importance are mainly explored in the context of long-term or cross-generational care, as the capability of taking time to care for one’s kin (Kilkey & Merla, 2014) or as an organiser of everyday transnational family life (Acedera & Yeoh, 2019). Likewise, in studies where time and family reunification have been at the centre, the collective nature of the wait has not been given notable attention (e.g. Näre, 2020).

In sum, the collective nature of waiting remains largely unexplored despite the current literature’s acknowledgement of increasing transnational family arrangements and subsequent family reunification, the negative consequences of forced separation and waiting characterising the migration experience.¹

Methodological reflections and data

Three family reunification stories from Sweden serve to explore collectivity in this study. Departing from the field of waiting in migration, their experiences are analysed with concepts from transnational family studies.

The three stories were chosen from nine semi-structured interviews with 14 informants in total conducted in May and June of 2021. Informants were found through Facebook groups and personal contacts. The couples reunited between 2018 and 2021, having been separated between seven and 18 months.

Joint interviews, meaning the partners were interviewed together, were used in the three stories. To avoid harming the relationship of those involved, this method requires both sensitivity and reflexivity. Sensitive topics or memories can be brought up by the researcher or either partner, and different views or motives for participation may cause disagreements between the partners (Voltelen et al., 2018). This was a risk in the present study, as the open-ended questions addressed expectations and planning, emotions, and support during the wait as well as their contact with the Swedish Migration Agency (hereafter SMA). Therefore, participants were always offered to be interviewed separately.

Further, confidentiality and anonymity between the partners are impossible due to the nature of joint interviews (Voltelen et al., 2018). Partners may therefore withhold information to avoid harming the other partner. In the present data, one partner asked for consent to reveal potentially sensitive information: before answering my question about challenges within waiting, Abbas looked at his wife Shaima and said ‘I’m gonna be real honest with her’ to which Shaima replied ‘yeah, please, go ahead’.

Despite the risk of losing information, the method was deemed suitable for its ability to provide more rich and detailed accounts of shared experiences, as interviewees may remind each other and fill in each other’s stories (Voltelen et al., 2018; Zarhin, 2018).

The interviews took place in the informants’ homes in Sweden over food or coffee and lasted between one hour and 19 min and three hours and 32 min. Two of the interviews were conducted in English and one in Swedish. After each interview, I recorded my thoughts about the dynamics and first perceptions from the interview. Thereafter, the material was transcribed and analysed thematically. With my previous knowledge on waiting in migration themes were created by marking patterns of collectivity, understood broadly as shared experiences or activities, in the transcribed material. As the analysis progressed, the resonance with concepts from transnational family studies became apparent and these were incorporated in the study.

Selection of interviews and concepts

While not a case study in the sense that different types of data inform a single topic, the selection process and characteristics of the three interviews nonetheless benefit from some explanation.

The three couples differ in a number of ways. In terms of residence status, the sponsors (meaning the person residing in Sweden wishing to bring their family member) constitute a female Swedish citizen, a female Pakistani student resident, and a Turkish man with refugee status. Their different residence permits subjected them to different regulations for entry to, continued residency in, and subsequent family reunification to Sweden. Moreover, their partners waited in different contexts: in Indonesia, Pakistan and Turkey respectively. While these divergences may have implications for their migration trajectories (cf. Bonizzoni, 2015) they are not the focus of this study. When chosen from the larger interview material, their differences were seen as a strength as they display collectivity across residence permit categories, providing a more nuanced and ‘whole’ insight of the phenomenon (Dumez, 2015). The aim is neither to say that collectivity explains all waiting experiences nor that they replace the individual experience: rather, it aims to highlight the added benefit of a collective awareness.

As a final note on the fundamental concepts of this study, family reunification refers to the act of reunifying in Sweden, regardless of how this was realised. I chose the term collectivity for its ability to capture experiences beyond individuals and nuclear family members and for its potential applicability beyond a transnational setting. Coming from a culture where ‘the individual [is] the basic building block of society’ (Tuhiwai-Smith, 1999, p. 51) my own views on social organisation as well as time are likely to have shaped the interview encounters and analysis. I often caught myself reinforcing a chronological understanding of time, starting interviews with ‘tell me how the process began’, and following up with ‘what happened next?’.

The research project was approved by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (no. 2021-01791) and consent was sought by all participants, who were given pseudonyms.

Framing the study: waiting and transnational family life

Below, a brief review on waiting in migration is outlined, followed by an overview of the transnational family concepts used.

Waiting in migration

Waiting experiences are lived by all human beings yet their nature is shaped by context, tradition and history (Bissell, 2007; Schweizer, 2005). The goal at the end of the wait provides a promise and a point of orientation, a sense of control (Bissell, 2007; Gasparini, 1995) or altogether shapes the experience of the wait (Bissell, 2007). For many migrants however, a future point in time is rarely given. This makes the wait permeated by uncertainty both in terms of outcome and duration (Bendixsen & Eriksen, 2018; Griffiths, 2014; Khosravi, 2017).

Providing and receiving waiting: time as a power tool

The built-in power relationship between providers and receivers of waiting has been brought up in numerous studies (e.g. Bélanger & Candiz, 2020; Bourdieu, 2000; Hage, 2009; Khosravi, 2017; Schweizer, 2005). Time has been identified as a tool to control migrants and bureaucracies induce waiting through their procedures (Rotter, 2016). Welfare states also employ overt ‘temporal tactics’ (Robertson & Runganaikaloo, 2014, p. 7) such as time frames before one is eligible for family reunification (Bech et al., 2017).

On the receiving end, time tools affect the capacity to engage in transnational familyhood (Acedera & Yeoh, 2019). Waiting ‘properly’, meaning with patience, becomes a virtue upheld even under very uncertain waiting conditions (Kwon, 2015). Yet migrants also use strategies to shorten the wait, for instance by applying in a different city or by contacting the responsible authorities (Bélanger & Candiz, 2020). Often, these strategies are based on guesses and attempts to ‘figure out the logic’ (Zhang et al., 2015, p. 241) of the migration administration. Migrants are also kept busy coordinating paperwork for application procedures, attending interviews, updating passports and more (Elliot, 2016; Näre, 2020). In Finland, Leinonen and Pellander (2020) found that refugees waiting for reunification perceived the process like deprivation of control of one’s own time. Finally, in long-term transnational family arrangements between Korea and China, waiting was found to be a joint project generating ‘a binding commitment between the divided parties’, while constituting ‘an active attempt to realize a collectively imagined future’ (Kwon, 2015, p. 480).

While the above displays that time has a place in transnational studies, transnational concepts have not, to my knowledge, been used to explain waiting as a collective phenomenon. Below, structural factors in transnational family life as well as delegation and coordination of support, emotional support, obligations, and care practices are explained more in detail.

Transnational family life

Family reunification and maintaining family life across national borders are both increasingly common phenomena globally (Suárez-Orozco et al., 2011). In Baldassar et al.’s (2007) words, transnational caregiving is ‘the exchange of care and support across distance and national borders’ (p. 14). Much like family life overall, transnational caregiving is reciprocal but with care flowing multi-directionally between migrants and those who stay behind (Baldassar et al., 2007; Baldassar & Merla, 2013). Care patterns and expectations on care may differ between cultures’ gendered understandings of familial obligations (Kilkey & Merla, 2014). Care patterns also change over time as familial roles shift and contextual factors at micro-, meso- and macro levels change (Baldassar et al., 2007; Kilkey & Merla, 2014). Today, transnational family relations are upheld largely with the help of technology, enabling immediate and simultaneous communication (Acedera & Yeoh, 2019).

Structural factors in transnational family relations

At the macro level, Baldassar et al. (2007) note how ‘migration policy and visa restrictions, employment policies, access to travel and telecommunication technologies, international relations between home and host countries and the political stability and safety of relevant nations’ (pp. 204–205) all affect the capacity to engage in transnational relationships. Therefore, they argue, it is necessary to pay attention to bureaucratic hurdles on mobility to understand transnational family ties (Baldassar et al., 2007).

Providing care at a distance: delegation and coordination of support

When a family member migrates, the direct provision of support given in physical presence becomes impossible. At a distance, virtual or proxy types of co-presence compensate for this lack of proximity (Baldassar, 2008; Baldassar, Nedelcu, et al., 2016). Kilkey and Merla (2014) develop a typology to describe transnational support: direct provision at a distance, coordination of, and delegation of support. Coordination may include family networks organising support, or about exchanging information about care options for a relative. Delegation of support, on the other hand, means entrusting another person to care for the person(s) in question. Direct provision is, as the name suggests, the support given directly between family members without middle-hands.

Finally, at the micro level Baldassar et al. (2007) note how transnational family life requires time for communication (calls, messages, potential visits) to uphold relationships, while job flexibility was also found to be key, especially for women, to accommodate potential visits.

Emotional support and care obligations

Building on the work of Finch (1989), Baldassar (2007) shows how different types of support are key in transnational family relations. For reasons of scope this article focuses on emotional support (but can also be moral, financial, practical, personal or given through provision of accommodation).

Emotional support includes putting time and effort into ‘staying in touch’ (Baldassar, 2007, p. 391). It is a type of emotional labour where communication is part of the family’s negotiated commitment while apart, and can be embodied through actions such as encouragement. These acts may also work as an emotional reminder which confirms the union of transnational families (Baldassar, Kilkey, et al., 2016). Staying in touch can be felt as an obligation motivated by guilt of leaving someone behind without physical care. This guilt can also be based on expectations and moral obligations between kin (Baldassar, 2015).

Care practices, tensions, and emotions

Baldassar (2007) identifies three care practices within transnational caregiving, namely routine-based practices which occur on an everyday basis (such as phone calls), ritual practices at special events, and practices of care work that take place during crises.

Longing, love and trust are common emotions in transnational family studies (Baldassar & Merla, 2013), but also tensions, with feelings of jealousy (Brunner et al., 2014; Kwon, 2015), impatience (Brunner et al., 2014), and even divorce (Kwon, 2015).

Sweden’s family reunification policy and application process

To contextualise the experiences of the interviewees a short overview of the Swedish family reunification process is presented below.

In 2016, Sweden’s family reunification laws became notably more restrictive in an effort to lessen asylum-based immigration (Borevi, 2018). Navigating the regulations is complex as they differ depending on age, citizenship(s) and the level of establishment of the relationship. The residence permit type of the sponsor also matters for eligibility, waiting time and for what permits are given to incoming family members. For example, an immigrant must wait for their own residence permit to be granted before the family can apply, and family members are only given a permit which at most corresponds to the residence permit time of the sponsor. Likewise, maintenance requirements apply to certain applicant groups while others are exempt: for students, there is no maintenance requirement while some refugees and Swedish citizens must provide proof of income and housing.

With an application for reunification, documentation such as copies of passports, marriage and birth certificates and proof of income and housing are attached and sent to the SMA (Swedish Migration Agency, 2020). The case handler at the SMA evaluates whether the couple needs interviewing before a decision is made, a process which has been shown to lead to unequal treatment between applications depending on the characteristics of the sponsor in Sweden (Rosén, 2010). Thereafter, the case handler investigates the case and makes a decision.

Findings & discussion: waiting for family reunification

Below, the reunification stories of Shaima and Abbas from Pakistan, Emir, Selma and their son Adnan from Turkey, and Alva and Budi from Sweden and Indonesia are told. Thereafter, their experiences are analysed using the literature and concepts presented above.

Case one: adventures and inside information

Shaima arrived in Sweden from Pakistan for a master’s programme in August 2020. Her husband Abbas had excitedly submitted the application for her and was the first to check whether she got the scholarship she had applied for. Having decided to ‘do things together’, they considered the move an ‘adventure’. Apart from gaining an international business network, the move constituted a long-term opportunity that would enable them to ‘return’ what they had been given by their middle-class families in Pakistan. But moving was also a way of gaining independence as a couple and making decisions ‘on our own’, away from the joint family system in Pakistan where ‘most of the decisions are taken by elders’.

Shaima soon received her Swedish visa, but Abbas’s application as a dependent spousal would not be granted on time for Shaima’s classes to start. There was little doubt that Abbas would get the permit: Shaima had checked Sweden’s family reunification policy and had heard rumours of the quick visa process. So despite a family member’s warnings of the difficult process they decided to apply after Shaima had arrived in Sweden, estimating they would reunite at most two months later.

When Shaima arrived, she learned ‘insider things’ about Swedish bureaucracy. Having to wait for her Swedish social security number and gathering the documents for reunification, their application was sent at the end of October. Abbas was then scheduled an interview in March. Laughing tiredly, Shaima said the interview date was a ‘broken dream’. Abbas called the SMA for an earlier date but was told to be happy to have received one so soon as waiting times had increased due to Covid-19. Abbas started realising

it’s gonna be a while now. And I cannot, we cannot be together/ … / I had this thing in mind like, it’s gonna take a year, and every day was passing by and the motivation, the positivity was going down and down and down. Till the final day of the interview.

The wait ‘tested us in many different ways’, Abbas said, sometimes leading to fights. Shaima would tell herself they were only fighting because they were ‘desperately waiting for us to be living together’. Abbas continued:

it was hard and at times, out of sadness, out of not being able to be with each other, made us mad. It didn’t allow us to look at things logically and it was like, why is it not happening, why [does it have] to be so long?

Shaima emphasised how supportive Abbas had remained throughout the process. Working and studying remotely due to Covid-19, they were connected throughout the day on video call. ‘Cleaning my room or eating or anything/ … / he would be in his room all the time and talking to me / … / we know each and every second of what we are doing’, Shaima said. This ability to be ‘with each other in everything’ made waiting a shared experience, she continued. No longer able to visit restaurants together, they ordered food to each other’s houses online on a regular basis. This, Abbas meant, ‘kept us closer’. For her birthday, Abbas paid Shaima’s friends for food and gifts and asked them to decorate the student dorm dining room and for his own, he celebrated with Shaima’s family in Pakistan.

After Abbas’s interview at the embassy, Shaima sent a final form to the SMA and attached ‘over a hundred screenshots of our chat and our pictures together’. The following Monday, after seven months of separation, their application was granted. Before leaving Pakistan, Abbas had dinner in complete silence with his family, his mother crying over his departure.

Looking back, both Shaima and Abbas were pleased with the work of the SMA in Pakistan, the last few days before Abbas’s arrival being the most stressful of the whole wait. But, said Shaima, laughing: ‘after patience the fruit is sweet’.

Case two: no time to wait

When Selma and Emir learned that Emir was on an arrest list for his connection to the Gülen movement, their plans of leaving Turkey together changed abruptly. Money was borrowed from friends and Emir was smuggled across the river to Greece, Selma and their son Adnan staying behind. Emir’s state-employee passport enabled visa-free travel within the Schengen area, so he left Greece by airplane and applied for asylum in Sweden.

When Emir arrived in Sweden in 2017 there was a backlog of cases from the so-called refugee crisis in 2015–2016, making the average wait for asylum 496 days (Swedish Migration Agency, 2018). While waiting for his own residence permit, Emir hoped to return if things would calm down in Turkey while Selma imagined joining him after finishing her research project. They imagined they would be separated for six months at most.

As time passed, staying became increasingly unsafe for Selma. Emir observed Turkey’s security situation carefully, feeling guilty about leaving the family behind. He felt unable to focus on his Swedish course and had nightmares of what would happen to his family: ‘My wife and my son were in Turkey; I could not do anything. It was very difficult’, he said, his powerlessness making him consider returning. ‘Always asking everybody’ of any news at a distance, he made sure his state-employed friends would warn Selma if her name were to appear on the arrest lists. Because of his guilt and worries, Selma reflected, waiting in Sweden was probably worse than in Turkey. For her, the closeness to Adnan eased the stressful fear of arrest, and everyday habits conveyed ‘good feelings’. She was rarely alone: Emir’s parents took turns at her house, and her father would cook for Adnan after school.

An escalation of events finally provoked their departure. Detained when applying for new passports for the family, she denied any connection with the Gülen movement, pretending to blame Emir for leaving her as a single provider. Later that day, she was released.

After a year and a half with no news of his asylum application and Selma’s safety at stake, there was no more time to wait for the bureaucratic reunification route to open. ‘Absolutely, I would have [applied if Emir had gotten his residence permit]! But it was not possible’, Selma said. But when attempting to leave Turkey, Selma and Adnan were taken into custody overnight.

Since his departure Emir and Selma had talked every day over WhatsApp. But when in custody Selma panicked as Emir repeatedly called her, as proof of their communication could endanger her safety. Worrying about Adnan sleeping upstairs, she decided that if released, they would leave Turkey and her research project behind.

Selma told Adnan they were going on an adventure. Resorting to smuggling, Emir felt a great relief knowing his family arrived safely in Greece, away from Turkey. They then prepared in different ways to reach Sweden: they applied for asylum in Greece to connect their cases via the United Nations, simultaneously paying for fake passports to fly to Sweden. On their third attempt, three months after their arrival in Greece, they managed to board a flight. ‘When we reunified’, she said, ‘only the bodies reunified/ … /I got flowers but I could not feel them’. After 18 months, she continued, ‘there are no dreams left. You just reunify and say that the child is well’. In Sweden, their asylum cases were merged and approved six months later; more than two years after Emir’s departure. ‘We did not feel like we were together, we had different situations’ said Emir when asked whether waiting was an individual or shared experience. ‘But we could understand one another’. Selma replied:

You’re right. But we had the same goal, to reunite. So the experience was the same because we had the same goal/ … /to, as quickly as possible, get that residence permit because we did dream sometimes, that I could from Turkey – didn’t we? – go by airplane/ … / but Emir had his own strains, the first migration process/ … /and to provide, and for me the same thing: Adnan was in first grade / … /. You [Emir] continue your life for the future of our family, to build it, and I continue living both for Adnan and me, for us to connect to the future family.

Case three: just a waste of time

After some time going back and forth on visitor’s visas between Indonesia and Sweden, Budi and Alva decided to apply for a two-year cohabitation visa. For Budi, leaving Indonesia and committing to the relationship meant to ‘put aside’ the individual, ‘sacrificing [his] future ahead’. Expecting a separation of four months, Alva said it was a ‘crash when I realised it could take a year’.

As a Swedish citizen, Alva was required to display a stable income and housing for the two. This ‘meant a lot of responsibilities that I didn’t count on’, she said. Having to work in Sweden, neither their initial plan of waiting together in Indonesia, nor the visitations that helped sustain their relationship in the past, were possible.

Uncertainty regarding the waiting time made any plan-making difficult for the two. An artist, Budi hesitated to start projects in Indonesia, simultaneously wanting ‘something to do’ if the process would take long. Said Alva:

if we would have known that we had ten months to wait, then we could make another plan. Because now I was making different plans in my head all the time and I was not taking a vacation during the summer because I was hoping I could go to Indonesia during the fall, and it was both because of Corona, but also because I had to earn a certain amount of money / … /and if I would get stuck there, I couldn't go back to work / … / So it was a lot of back and forth and then a lot of times we felt like just … fuck this.

Alva called the SMA every week. She asked about progress in their case, and continuously sent pictures proving the seriousness of their relationship. She found herself reluctantly ‘aggressive’ and ‘annoying’ toward the case worker but figured it could help ‘because then you’re [the caseworker] pushed to do something’. The couple also considered getting married despite marriage not being an official requirement for reunification – ‘but then you never know’.

The two dealt with uncertainty and communication in different ways. Budi wanted to ‘take it as it comes’, his motivation to wait a ‘cliché, but like, I love her that much’. Feeling ‘mutual respect’ and commitment between the two lessened his frustration. Meanwhile, Alva felt as though she were in ‘limbo’ because of the uncertainty, making her anxious and feeling stuck. ‘I have to live here, I have to work here just to make you be able to come here’, she said, sometimes wanting to ‘scream’ at their case worker. As Budi assured her screaming would not help, his calm made her feel ‘more grounded’. Likewise, when receiving text messages of good morning, she would feel a ‘boost’. Reflecting on what her stress meant for Budi, she told him:

you felt pressured that ‘oh, I need to call her again. I need to do this to make her pleased’ and I was really demanding with that because I was like, we don't have any communication/ … / I mean I wanted to be with you. It was just that I wanted it to feel like we did this together.

Their different communication and coping approaches also created tension and jealousy. For Alva, Budi’s life seemed to continue unaffected by the separation. This made waiting ‘an individual experience’, she said, as she felt lonely, having to ‘work and then come home and call migration / … /I was just stressed up all the time, that I had to call them and I know I will be on a waiting line for a few hours’. Yet comparing their experiences, she said

when I felt sorry for myself [because] I had to do so much here, I reminded myself that the big decision was for you. I mean, to move your whole life here/ … / I could just continue my life here with my family and friends. And you had to switch, and also for, we don't know how long.

As Alva went on sick leave due to a burnout, her income decreased. ‘I was really scared that that was going to affect our process/ … /of ruining it’. Meanwhile, she feared Budi’s embassy interview would resemble an interrogation, pushing him to prepare carefully. He arrived an hour early to repeat all the names of Alva’s family members. In case the wait would continue, Alva had prepared a request to conclude, an official complaint which can be submitted at earliest six months after application to shorten the handling time (Swedish Migration Agency, 2021). Yet that same day, their application was granted.

Looking back, Budi said that ‘the waiting period [was] our biggest issue actually/ … /a waste of time. Even if we learned something, we got out stronger, it’s like: we are already old and decided to be together’.

Concluding discussion: the added value of collectivity in waiting

The reunification stories above display the benefit of considering collectivity in waiting. Heeding the call of Baldassar (2007) to pay attention to mobility hurdles in transnational family life and with the role of powers in waiting trajectories in mind, the discussion below starts with a focus on the Swedish welfare state as a provider of waiting. Thereafter, transnational family concepts will connect the reunification stories to collectivity.

The Swedish welfare state conditioning the wait

As outlined at the outset of this article, power affects both waiting trajectories and transnational care arrangements. The interviews provide an insight into the nature of this relationship and how Swedish policy affects both Swedish and foreign residents in a single waiting experience.

The main provider of waiting (Hage, 2009) brought up was the SMA. Yet other bureaucratic structures of the Swedish welfare state also had an impact on their time in waiting, primarily in three ways.

First of all, not only family reunification as a bureaucratic process per sé but a combination of bureaucratically induced waiting processes (Rotter, 2016) increased the time in separation. This was seen in Emir’s wait for asylum, Shaima’s wait for a social security number, or Covid-19 travel restrictions making Alva stay in Sweden to avoid getting stranded in Indonesia.

The state also conveyed desired activities and behaviours during the wait in at least four ways. First, the obligation for Alva to fulfil the maintenance requirement meant she had to work, keeping her and Budi separated. Second, the failure to provide an estimated duration of the wait sent mixed messages to the partners, whose behaviours were encouraged in opposite directions: while Alva was placed in the role of provider, Budi was expected to be flexible to move at any time if their case would be settled quickly. Resonating with the flexibility required in transnational families (Baldassar, 2007), this made him unable to plan for his own provision in Indonesia. Third, the case handling time for asylum and Emir and Selma’s wish to wait ‘properly’ (Kwon, 2015) for his residence permit had spillover effects on Selma’s safety as the likelihood of her getting arrested seemed to increase with time. Ultimately, Emir’s drawn-out asylum process left Selma and Adnan with little choice but to resort to irregular routes of migrating.

The fourth way in which the state prompted (collective) action was through joint bureaucratic work (cf. Näre, 2020). This included coordination of paperwork, providing proof of authenticity of their relationships, updating passports, and attending interviews for Alva, Budi, Shaima, and Abbas. Trying to shorten the wait, a joint effort initiated by the couples themselves to ensure quicker reunification became apparent too (as described by Bélanger & Candiz, 2020; Zhang et al., 2015): Abbas and Alva approached the SMA, Selma and Emir the UN, and Alva helped Budi prepare for his interview to ensure a positive outcome.

Common goals in waiting

On the receiving end, a collective lens enriches waiting by understanding its motives and goals better. While widely acknowledged that transnational family relations can be sustained over a long time, family reunification, like most waiting experiences, constituted a future-oriented phenomenon in these interviews (Gasparini, 1995) where the goal was to end the wait. This goal or ‘promise of the event-to-come’ (Bissell, 2007, p. 282) was a collective one, which similar to Kwon (2015)’s informants between China and Korea constituted a joint project aiming at a future imagined together based on their commitment to one another. Apart from the joint effort to shorten the wait as mentioned above, this was seen in Selma’s and Emir’s common goal of reuniting safely in Sweden, in Budi ‘put[ting] aside the individual’, or in Shaima’s and Abbas’s aim to ‘do things together’ and to return what their families had given them.

Transnational caregiving in collective waiting

The many transnational elements and reciprocity within the wait for family reunification reveal its collective nature. The wait was permeated by routine-based care practices through daily video calls and text messages reinforcing a sense of union (Baldassar, 2007; Baldassar, Nedelcu, et al., 2016), and of ordering food at a distance to one another. It also contained elements of ritual practices such as when Abbas prepared Shaima’s birthday. Emir trying to ensure the safety of Selma could be seen as a care practice of crisis (cf. Baldassar, 2007), while also constituting a type of care delegation (Kilkey & Merla, 2014) as his state-employee friends were entrusted with issuing warnings. Selma’s parents facilitating her everyday life may also be considered a form of delegation or coordination of support.

The collective wait was, as for many transnational families, facilitated by communication technology (Baldassar, Kilkey, et al., 2016). Yet the ability to constantly be available also shaped patterns of obligation: as Alva felt that Budi’s approach to the wait and their different communication strategies constituted a lack of engagement toward their goal of reunifying, she pressured Budi to increased contact which led to tension between the two. And while Emir and Selma called each other daily, the forced nature of his migration also made communication a potential threat to Selma, as during her time in arrest.

Alva, Shaima and Abbas all articulated a point of realisation where they understood the separation would be longer than expected. This was expressed as a ‘crash’ and a ‘broken dream’, perhaps a sign of powerlessness caused by the process being out of their hands (cf. Leinonen & Pellander, 2020). Yet emotional support through encouragement as that felt by both Alva and Shaima from their partners (Baldassar, 2007), feelings of love, longing and trust were also features in the interviews which made the wait bearable (as for Budi). Finally, the cases above displayed the role of sacrifice in achieving their common goal: Budi ‘giving up his life’ while Alva chose immobility for their future; Emir wanting to return but staying put to secure a joint future, and Abbas leaving his extended family for a new adventure.

Conclusions

Adding collectivity may help us better understand the role of policies and bureaucratic processes in waiting. As a provider of waiting, the Swedish welfare state’s combined bureaucratic procedures shaped the experiences of both Swedish citizens and immigrants regardless of residence permit type. Delaying family reunification eligibility until residence permits are granted is one example of a temporal tactic that had collective consequences for residents both in Sweden and abroad.

Borrowing concepts from transnational family studies helped reveal the role of care practices, common goals, technology and mutual support in shapeing collective waiting experiences on the receiving end.

The limitations of this article provide guidance for further research. First, Selma and Emir’s story reveal a need to explore the role of sending and transit states in framing a collective wait. Second, exploring waiting through a dyadic lens may underestimate the active roles of other kin in the waiting experience. A third point for future research is how different residence permit categories and the capacity to navigate host countries’ bureaucracies (Ukrayinchuk & Havrylchyk, 2020) affect both the conditions of waiting and the strategies of those in waiting to shorten it. Finally, in the light of welfare states’ increasingly restrictive policies on family reunification a transnational multi-sited approach could reveal the stories of those unable to reunify at all.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Malmö Högskola.

Notes on contributors

Hilda Gustafsson

Hilda Gustafsson is a PhD Candidate in International Migration and Ethnic Relations at the Department of Global Political Studies of Malmö University, Sweden. She holds a MA degree in International Migration and Ethnic Relations from Malmö University, Sweden, and a BMSc degree in Public Health Science from Gothenburg University, Sweden. Her PhD thesis focuses on waiting in migration, particularly in Swedish family reunification, exploring collective aspects as well as mental health implications of the time in family separation.

Notes

1 For an adjacent exception, see Martinez-Aranda (2020).