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

ABSTRACT

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

SAMMENDRAG

Artikeln undersöker erfarenheter av 'tidsmässigt berövande' (temporal dispossession) inom migrationsbyråkrati i Sverige med särskilt fokus på asylprocessen. Med utgångspunkt i intervjuer och etnografiskt arbete med handläggare på Migrationsverket och personer som sökt asyl under den ‘tillfälliga’ asyllagen i Sverige, synliggörs hur tidspolitik är inneboende i fördelningen av livschanser inom statliga praktiker. Ett särskilt fokus ligger på effekterna av nyliberala tidsstruktureringar. Genom att undersöka hur väntan används som ett instrument för tidsmässigt berövande i form av stagnerande och accelererade tidsramar synliggörs hur väntan formas genom olika tidslogiker som upprätthåller gränsdragningar för (o)levbara och (icke)sörjbara liv. Analysen visar på de förhandlingar, strategier och kamper som äger rum inom migrationsbyråkratin, och understryker därigenom tidens relationella karaktär som en kontrollmekanism. Centralt är hur migrationsbyråkratin berövar både statliga tjänstemän och de som söker asyl på deras tid, men med väldigt olika effekter på fördelningen av deras respektive livschanser.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration bureaucracy
• temporal dispossession
• temporary asylum law
• neoliberalism
• Sweden

NYCKELORD:

• migrationsbyråkrati
• tidsmässigt berövande
• tillfälliga asyllagen
• nyliberalism Sverige

Introduction

Arriving here and waiting for years, there is an Afghan saying that you are ‘cutting heads with cotton’. At first, the cotton is very soft against your skin (…). But after some time, the cotton becomes a thick thread that is used to cut off your head. This is the Swedish government. (Conversation with Aref, 20 November 2019)

In June 2016, following an agreement with the right-wing party alliance, the Social Democratic–Green coalition government in Sweden enforced the Temporary Aliens Act (Swedish statute 2016:752), also known as the ‘temporary asylum law’, with the purpose to deter people from seeking asylum in Sweden (see Sager & Öberg, 2017). This was accomplished through retraction of asylum rights, reintroduction of administrative border controls, and increased deportation efforts (Abdelhady et al., 2020a). In the proverb above, Aref, described his experiences with seeking asylum under the new law in Sweden, and the process of waiting for his asylum decision, as an example of gradual violence enacted by the state through the slow passage of time. Rather than coincidental, Aref’s experience clearly illustrates the implications that followed the new law. Part of this ‘prevention through deterrence’ (Walia, 2021) policy was severely restricting asylum opportunities, and making the temporary residence permit (TRP), rather than the permanent residence permit (PRP), the main rule for those who obtained protection status. Renewal of residence permits also became temporary, enforcing continual circulation within the asylum system (Thorburn Stern, 2019).

The temporary law effectively changed the temporalities of the asylum system, thereby making time and timing central means of migration control. The law was called ‘temporary’ as it was originally argued to be a ‘law of exception’. However, as it was made permanent in June 2021, TRP shifted from a state of exception to become the new normal. This epitomises both the irony of how the connotation of ‘temporary’ shifted from the law to the form of asylum, as well as the process of reconstructing the meaning of asylum and asylum rights. The law can be seen as a part of the substantial development toward securitisation of migration and increasingly militarised, repressive border regimes taking place during the past two decades in Sweden and across Europe (Drangsland, 2021; Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2020; Lindberg, 2019; Sager & Öberg, 2017; Tazzioli, 2018).

Despite the enforcement of the ‘temporary’ law in June 2016, it was first introduced at a press conference on 24th November 2015. This date has become a symbolic demarcation between applications of the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ law. The law was applied retroactively, affecting those who applied for asylum after the 24th November 2015, or whose asylum decisions were issued after the implementation of the new law in June 2016 (Elsrud et al., 2021a). What I aim to do here is to examine how time and timing are enacted as mechanisms of power and control within contemporary migration bureaucracy. In addition, I investigate both the manifestation of ‘control over time’, through the legal regime of the temporary asylum law, and the ‘control through time’ (Tazzioli, 2018, p. 13), here understood as manifested in the conditions of waiting in the asylum process. Control through time is seen in how bureaucratic power produces waiting, and provides what one is waiting for (Hage, 2009). As such, I examine the relational character of waiting, by engaging with the experiences of both state officials at the Migration Agency’s asylum unit and individuals who sought asylum under the temporary law.

Previous scholarship has recognised time and temporalities as important control elements in researching the governing of migration (Andersson, 2014; Drangsland, 2021; Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2020; Tazzioli, 2018). However, waiting has often been unexplored beyond the assumptions of stasis, suspension, and slowness (see Jacobsen & Karlsen, 2020 for an elaboration). As such, I here demonstrate how waiting is shaped by different temporal logics enacted within migration bureaucracy and the asylum procedure. These temporal logics construct waiting not only in terms of stasis and slowness but in terms of pace (slowing and accelerating) and timing (dates, in time/out of time, described further below). These are explored by asking: How are timing and pace enacted in the asylum process? and What are the consequences of these temporal logics for those seeking asylum and state officials? Drawing on theories of time and dispossession in the neoliberal welfare state, I argue that the temporal logics manifested within migration bureaucracy contribute to the dispossession of both those seeking asylum and state officers, through the structuring of time as a political tool.

Background: state categorisation and distribution of life chances

In research examining the bureaucratic processes of asylum and their systems of categorisation (see, for instance, Eule et al., 2019; Kalir, 2017; Kronman & Jönsson, 2020; Wettergren & Wikström, 2014), little attention has been given to how time and temporalities play into these processes, particularly within migration bureaucracy. Arguably, systems of categorisation are inherent to the welfare state, as seen in Sweden’s long history of categorising citizens in terms of ‘(un)deservingness’, often coupled with their capacity to work (Kamali & Jönsson, 2018). Similarly, social work research has long engaged with how welfare state practices distinguish between ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor (for instance, see Davidsson, 2015; Johansson, 2001), a discursive formation that includes marginalised populations at large and currently foregrounds migration as its central issue in Sweden and across Europe (Nordling, 2017; see also Rajaram, 2018; Ramsay, 2020). Hence, while the temporary law has often been depicted as a radical restructuring of asylum rights in Sweden (see, for example, Schierup et al., 2017; Thorburn Stern, 2019), it should instead be understood as feeding into a history of positioning different groups, including migrants, as threats to the welfare state and labour market conditions, which can be traced back to the 1930s in the Swedish context (Brochmann & Hammar, 1999; Johansson, 2005, 2014; Johansson, 2008).

Expanding on this research tradition, I apply a temporal lens to practices of categorisation, focusing on the case of migration bureaucracy. Hence, time and timing are deemed political resources affecting an individual’s protection status, in turn affecting their access to welfare and welfare rights (Elsrud et al., 2021b). Similarly, while there is previous research on state officials within migration bureaucracy and how they relate to the asylum process (see Abdelhady et al., 2020b; Hedlund, 2017; Wettergren, 2010; Wettergren & Wikström, 2014), few scholars have engaged with the temporal aspects of migration governance that organise this daily work, and its effects on the asylum process. As I argue herein, state power is crucial to the distribution of time, and how time becomes an effective means of dispossessing certain groups of their life chances.

Theoretical framework: temporal dispossession and the uneven distribution of life chances

Contemporary migration governance is here understood as intertwined with the reproduction of global capitalism, where processes of dispossession have been central to the generation of wealth (Çağlar, 2018; Harvey, 2004). Capitalist accumulation and its dispossessive forces take various forms, manifesting acutely in wars and conflict and corresponding violent expulsions that forcibly displace and ‘physically remove populations from contested land’, and are chronically, seen in the neoliberal restructurings of society with its dismantling of social rights (Harvey, 2004; Ramsay, 2020, p. 388). This is especially apparent in the political economy of migration, where borders play a crucial role in organising labour globally (Cross, 2021; Gardiner Barber & Lem, 2018), as borders exclude (neo)colonised subjects from accessing resources, mobility, and social rights while including them only as exploitable labour (De Genova, 2019).

While the spatial and subjective aspects of dispossession have been emphasised in previous research (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013; Harvey, 2004; Luxemburg, 2003; Mezzadra & Neilson, 2013), I here seek to contribute to research by examining how dispossession operates in and through the border regime, and more specifically through temporal governance, and how the latter is weaponised to dispossess people from their life chances. Hence, budling on the work of Georgina Ramsay (2020), dispossession is not only understood as a question of acquisition of land and resources, constructing displacement as a pervasive condition, but as a temporal dynamic that dispossess people of their time, temporal horizons and the possibility of a navigable future (see also Khosravi, 2019; Wan, 2019). It is also dispossessing people of the time they have spent to ‘accumulate economic, social and cultural capital’ (Khosravi, 2019, p. 421) through deportation or threats of deportability. A focus on dispossession, rather than just control, over the time thus enables an analysis of the continuations of capitalism and how migration bureaucracy is part of a larger political economy extending beyond border controls.

In analysing temporal dispossession, I draw on temporal governance as the ‘institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 108) that form the temporal exercise of power. Within this, temporal logics are drawn upon to entail how time and timing are enacted to construct demarcations of intelligibility and the ideologies that affect the distribution of symbolic and material resources, referred to as ‘the distribution of life chances’, to borrow the terminology of Dean Spade (2015). This can be seen in the temporal configurations that materialise within the asylum process, and how this is used in demarking (un)intelligible life. This can be seen in how New Public Management as a neoliberal logic that constructs time as a scarce resource to be accelerated, instrumented, and commodified (Adam, 1995). Another prevalent logic in the analysis is what Shahram Khosravi (2019) describes as a ‘racial time’. That is, how different groups are constructed as being in time or out of time, where people categorised as refugees, asylum-seekers, or undocumented are positioned outside of European time and thus as belonging to ‘a racial time, a non-white time that legitimises bordering them, exposing them to differential inclusion but also to exclusion, i.e. detention and deportation’ (Khosravi, 2019, p. 417). Being placed inside or outside of time thus upholds boundaries between (un)intelligible lives and, in turn, affects the distribution of life chances and the boundaries of (un)liveable (Mbembe, 2003) and (un)grievable lives (Butler, 2004).

Hence, drawing on temporal dispossession as a theoretical framework offers an understanding of how migration bureaucracy partakes in temporal politics that dispossess populations made (un)intelligible through different temporal configurations.

Methods and methodology

Drawing on ethnographic engagements with individuals who sought asylum in Sweden between 2015 and 2017, and interviews with officials working at the Migration Agency, I examine how temporal dispossession is enacted within migration bureaucracy, and how it affects both those governing migration and those who are governed. I draw on interviews with 14 individuals within the asylum process, recruited through snowball sampling during fieldwork at accommodations centres, courses introducing migrants to Swedish society, and similar sites. Among these individuals, six had received a TRP (13 months) and eight remained within various stages of the asylum process (for example, application, appeal to migration court, or appeal to the higher court of migration). I followed these individuals closely from 2018 to 2021, collecting data including fieldnotes, formal interviews, and informal interviews, the topics of which were based on the interlocutors’ interests. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with five officials at one of the asylum units at the Migration Agency during 2018. The bureaucratic structure of the Migration Agency consists of different units, where asylum applications are processed at the asylum unit. Herein, a case officer is responsible for the applicant’s asylum case, assisted by a decision-maker (see Wettergren, 2010 for a more detailed overview). I interviewed three case officers and two decision-makers, and the interviews lasted one to two hours and followed a semi-structured interview guide.

In this article, I focus on how different experiences of seeking asylum and negotiations of time materialise at different points in the asylum process and/or Migration Agency work. Hence, I direct my attention to the temporal conditions and practices in which these experiences materialise, rather than treating the individuals themselves as the objects of investigation (Keshavarz, 2016).

All fieldwork and interviews were conducted in Swedish or English. With interlocutors whose use of these languages was fragmented, we used Google Translate during conversations and revisited topics over the years as their knowledge in the languages developed. I was thus able to clarify earlier misunderstandings and expand on their narratives. The research was approved by the Regional Ethics Board in Gothenburg (reg no. 812-18) and followed ethical recommendations concerning confidentiality, consent, and integrity.

Results

Commodification of time

The asylum decision-making process is slow, formed by time-consuming applications and numerous judicial hearings. This process relates to how several scholars have identified waiting as inherent to the bureaucratic state (Auyero, 2012; Gupta, 2012; Jeffrey, 2010). While many interlocutors described their experience of bureaucracy as a slow, dead time that morphed into Kafkaesque time suspension, Migration Agency officials’ experiences were quite to the contrary. Time is a governing principle that structures the latter’s work, yet through the frame of acceleration (Ramsay, 2020), consistent with NPM efficiency ideals (Migrationsverket, 2014). This was particularly visible among the case officers, whose daily work was expected to be performed according to a highly standardised temporal template:

NAVID, CASE OFFICER: We work with sub tasks (arbetsmoment). An investigation of three hours is considered a work task. An established decision is a work task. You are expected to have four to six work tasks a week or so. (…) It’s the three hours we get and in those three hours, we have to investigate everything [in the individual’s case].

As Navid depicted, sub-task timeframes reflect efficiency ideals, as related to NPM goal orientation and efficiency measures. Elaborating on this, he argued that this was part of the Migration Agency’s continual evaluation, in which officers must report their monthly statistics to their superiors.

NAVID, CASE OFFICER: If an oral supplement [to the initial asylum hearing] is needed, it is not included in our statistics for work tasks as individual case officers. (…) Say I have not had time to finish an investigation in three hours, then I must complement it with an oral supplement. Say that supplement is three hours, then three hours disappear – it’s like I’ve never even been here. I have been at work, and I get paid for it, but it is not recorded in my statistics that I have had another work task.

Awareness of productive time – time accounted for in case officers’ statistics – was articulated by all the Migration Agency officials interviewed, and most prominently by the case officers. As Blix and Wettergren (2019, p. 59) argue, this relates to the ‘steadily shrinking managerial tolerance for “waste of time” and budget transgressions’ characteristic for all types of welfare services governed by the NPM principles. Another case officer, Daniel, described his awareness of productivity in terms of a feeling that ‘you had a whip behind you if you did not reach the numbers’ expected. Statistics are thus used as a timing and disciplining device by which officials adhere to constructed timeframes and productivity goals. Navid’s experience also illustrates the arbitrary nature of time being ‘discounted’ from his statistics if he departed from the standardised politics of time and productivity (see also Altermark, 2020). The time pressures on case officers’ daily work thus highlight the time economy within the Migration Agency, where time becomes converted into an invariable, quantitative, abstract exchange value (Adam, 1995, pp. 90–91) in continuous acceleration. This pressure for an acceleration of time at the Migration Agency relates to the increased demand for measurable goals that reflect results, performance, and effect within NPM governance (Altermark, 2020; Hjärpe, 2020). Thus, there exists a systematic lack of waiting among migration officers in the asylum process, emphasising the inherent tensions and asymmetries in waiting (Bourdieu, 2000; Hage, 2009) and the uneven distribution of time (Hanchard, 1999; Ramsay, 2020). Those seeking asylum wait for months, or years; however, when meeting with their case officer, they face a system with little-to-no time flexibility. Likewise, case officers must stay in time with frantic NPM temporal frames to secure their continued employment and livelihood at the Migration Agency (Ramsay, 2020).

This systemic inflexibility can be connected to the practice of non-personification and distancing routines experienced by asylum applicants. As one decision-maker explained, migration officials are continually cautioned to keep at a (emotional) distance and avoid personal contact with those seeking asylum (see also Kalir, 2019; Wettergren, 2010) as a means of performing professionalism.

BEATA, DECISION-MAKER: We try to convey to all employees to try to avoid having personal conversations with the parties, for example when it comes to submissions or appeals. (…) We have absolutely no personal matters, just because I am [working on] a case, it does not mean that I am the one who must make the decision, anyone can jump in and take it.

As explained by Beata, asylum cases are rendered interchangeable, in the sense that they should be able to circulate within the organisation. This invokes Bauman’s (1991, p. 102) observations on modern bureaucracy as not only predicated on the ‘dehumanization of the objects of bureaucratic operation’, but on how distancing practices render invisible the consequences for those affected by removing any direct contact between the administrators who preside over their situation and those affected by the decisions (see also Kalir, 2019; Wettergren, 2010). Bureaucratic distance thus becomes a way to standardised interactions, within which there is no time to become engaged or invested in the individual cases, no time to feel responsible; all cases, applicants, and case officers are intended to be interchangeable. These distancing principles are motivated by an ideal of equality, that is, that asylum cases should be processed equally independent on the case officer. However, it is evident that case officers make different interpretations, and see different spaces for action within the existing regulations (see Carlsson & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2019). When a case officer does become engaged, this time is symbolically erased and practically discounted from the officers’ statistics, as Navid described. Such bureaucratic governance causes multiple temporal tensions in the asylum process, prohibiting officials from waiting or spending time on or with asylum applicants. Moreover, it turns waiting against those seeking asylum, as explained below.

The ‘free’ narrative and its conditioning through time

In their interviews, the migration officials all emphasised the importance of the applicant’s ‘free’ narrative (fri berättelse) at their asylum hearing. However, all interlocutors who had sought asylum experienced their ‘free narrative’ as consistently conditioned and fragmented by the turn-taking among the case officer, interpreter, and themselves. They described waiting for the interpreter to translate, for their turn to speak, and for the case officer to transcribe; they also described a lack of patience among case workers when they attempted to make themselves intelligible. Despite being encouraged to speak ‘freely’, all interlocutors experienced repeatedly being disrupted in their narrative if the case officer deemed information insignificant, again raising the issue of time politics inherent to the asylum hearing. This is also illustrated in the transcript from Yasmine’s asylum protocol, below, in which she was asked to refrain from speaking in longer sentences and to take the interpretation and transcription process into consideration while speaking.

ANNA, CASE OFFICER: It is important that we don’t speak in too many sentences at a time during the conversation, and that you speak loud and clear so that I have time to write, and the interpreter has time to translate (transcript, Yasmine’s asylum protocol).

The so-called ‘free’ narrative of those seeking asylum is thus continually conditioned by different actors in the asylum hearing, while simultaneously being fragmented by the nature of the hearing (Rehnberg et al., 2020; Wadensjö et al., 2021). It is through the case officer and interpreter that the narrative is written and takes its definitive form and is made static in time. Despite this, the role of the interpreter is rendered invisible in the asylum protocol, a process that is not unproblematic.

RAMIN, CASE OFFICER: The absolute biggest problem that can arise [during the asylum process] is not being able to make oneself understood by applicants. (…) this is something that we encounter quite often, that we do not understand each other. Partly because you speak through an interpreter, which I think is very difficult. That is, that you and I are sitting here talking to each other and that a third party would be sitting here [interpreting]. (…) and then culturally to be able to convey your feelings in another language and to have this be interpreted too.

These conflicts arising from communicating through an interpreter reflect work by Patricia Lorenzoni (2021, p. 28), in which she argues that the interpretation process is rendered visible through the linguistic gaps and dissonance in the transcript, often producing ‘contradictions, inconsistencies, and uncertainties’. While such inconsistencies may be a way to sense the presence of an interpreter and are generated by the translation itself, they are often attributed to shortcomings of the applicant’s asylum narrative. This contradicts the juridical assumption of legal documentation as exhaustive, transparent, and offering a good representation of the subject’s case (see Wettergren & Wikström, 2014). Moreover, this in itself risk becoming a vicious cycle, in which assessors treat details in applicants’ narratives as insignificant, leaving them underdeveloped, which in turn reinforces their insignificance in the eyes of the law. As many asylum applications are rejected on the basis that the asylum narrative is ‘vague and poor in detail’ (Rehnberg et al., 2020; Wadensjö et al., 2021), there is a clear paradoxical failure to recognise the temporal neoliberal timeframes and politics that shape such fragmentation in the first place.

Another aspect of asylum hearing fragmentation brought up by the interlocutors was the hearing’s restricted pace in how they were expected to respond to the pace set by the interpreter and case officer. During a conversation with Ali about his asylum hearing, he described a growing frustration from repeatedly being asked the same questions, restricting him from moving forward in his narrative. This relates to how the case officers are supposed to use repetitions to establish consistency, toward distinguishing between criminalising discourses of ‘bogus’ and ‘real’ refugees. As such, the asylum hearing reiterates a ‘culture of disbelief’ (Khosravi, 2010) and shares many traits with police interrogations (Bohmer & Shuman, 2007), treating individuals as suspicious if they either articulate a ‘too detailed’ narrative or fail to give one that is ‘rich enough’. This echoes a radical incalculability (Wan, 2019) of the asylum process, in which individuals risk being dispossessed through the reproduction of ‘improper’ subjectivities (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 18).

The various uses of repetition shed further light on the fragility of time in the hearing process when both form and pace are intrinsically important; time becomes a scarce resource for the applicant, one they must use effectively to articulate their need for protection. The use of interrogative repetitions or faulty, slow interpreters were thus not only experienced as risking misinterpretation of the interlocutors, but were seen as temporal inefficiency and thus a theft of their time.

The politics of waiting: time and timing as ‘evidence’

While I have touched on how governance of the asylum hearing is conditioned by the logic of NPM and its temporal frames of time and pace, the asylum hearing also constructs time and timing as ‘evidence’ of (un)intelligibility and thus (un)deservingness in several ways.

Not having waited long enough

Aref, a journalist in his late 20s, fled Afghanistan and sought asylum in Sweden in 2015 after receiving threats from the Taliban based on his work reporting on the organisation and their war crimes. After receiving his first rejection by the Migration Agency, Aref appealed to the Migration court. At his court hearing three years later, the lay judges (nämndemän) argued that Aref had provided vague information, particularly about why he would be of interest to the Taliban. Despite Afghanistan being one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists (Rönnqvist Fors, 2021), the threats posed to Aref by the Taliban were diminished, as he could not provide evidence of the threats, which had twice been delivered over the phone. Moreover, the threats had not been acted upon. Hence, according to the Migration court, Aref had not waited long enough in Afghanistan for the Taliban to put their threats into practice, and thus his claims were discredited by the Swedish court due to the lack of visible bodily impact.

Similar to Aref, Rupi’s lack of bodily evidence to support the threats she had received from the Syrian security police was brought up during her asylum hearing as a point of interrogation. Rupi, a woman in her mid-twenties from Syria, had received a 13-month TRP in 2017. When she read her interview transcript from the Migration Agency a year later, upon renewal of her residence permit, she told me that her transcript stated, ‘but the security police did not take you’. At this, Rupi laughed aloud, jokingly asking, ‘What do they think? That I should stay in Syria, be taken by the security police, and then call from prison and say “hello, I’m in prison, can I apply for asylum in Sweden?”’. Reiterating a ‘culture of disbelief’ (Khosravi, 2010), Aref’s and Rupi’s experiences point to how deservingness in the asylum system is constructed through frames of suffering. As argued by Khosravi (2010, p. 114), suffering is assumed to leave physical traces, whereas the lack of bodily ‘evidence’ fuels discourses of undeservingness. To make one’s suffering intelligible, one needs to wait, threats need time to materialise and leave traces on the body to be accepted in the asylum process. Thus, not having waited long enough constitutes threats of suffering as symbolic, placing them outside of norms of recognition. This not only affords the state officials risk-taking in rejecting protection, but further reinforces the differentiating practices of (un)grievable life: that is the uneven distribution of risks concerning ‘injury, violence, poverty, indebtedness and death’ (Butler & Athanasiou, 2013, p. 19).

Waiting too long

Some interlocutors had circulated among different asylum systems for years, as well illustrated by Jamshid. A man in his mid-thirties from Afghanistan, Jamshid had sought asylum for the past 15 years. After fleeing Afghanistan in 2005 due to a land rights conflict in which he had been forcibly dispossessed of his land by relatives, Jamshid sought asylum in Norway in 2004. While awaiting assessment of his asylum case, he discovered Christianity within the local community, to which he later converted and was baptised. After being deported to Afghanistan in 2008, he made multiple attempts to seek asylum elsewhere. In 2015, Jamshid sought asylum in Sweden based on ongoing threats over both land rights and his conversion to Christianity. After receiving his rejection by the Migration Agency in Sweden in 2017, Jamshid spent three years in a protracted ‘political containment’ (Ramsay, 2020, p. 401), awaiting the date of his appeal to the Migration court. In November 2020, he was called for an oral appeal, one week later, he received his second asylum case rejection. Echoing the radical incalculability of temporal dispossession, time was frenzied compared with the prolong wait for his court date (Wan, 2019). When we spoke over the phone, Jamshid explained the court’s decision:

They said that ‘we have a problem with you moving fifteen or sixteen years ago, it happened a long time ago. We’re not processing what was sixteen years ago’. Because I didn’t live in Afghanistan, right? [They said] ‘You have not lived in Afghanistan for sixteen years’.

Jamshid pointed out how the court’s rejection touched on the temporal aspect of his asylum claims. The threats against him were portrayed by the Migration court as lacking urgency after the passage of time. This resonates with William Walters’ (2011, p. 142) understanding of ‘presentism’ as the fascination with the immediate present. While Walters focuses on a decolonial approach to social sciences, his questioning of this fascination resonates with temporal politics at large. Arguably, the dominance of presentism tends to neglect a historicised and genealogical understanding of the phenomena at hand, in Jamshid’s case enforcing a discontinuity between his past, present, and future (Wan, 2019).

The politics of timing

A central temporal mechanism emerging during the interviews and fieldwork was how time and timing were enacted as mechanisms to discard interlocutor’s need of protection. In Jamshid’s verbal appeal, the Migration court discarded his Christianity as a ground for protection by referencing the timing of his conversion. As he had converted after his initial rejection by the Norwegian asylum process in 2004, the Swedish court deemed his faith untrustworthy 16 years later, which discounted his years of religious practice. When elaborating on the court’s decision, Jamshid rejected its legitimacy, pointing out that the decision was at odds with how religious faith is practised:

They said: ‘You converted after the first rejection in Norway’. But it doesn’t matter if I found God after the first, second, or third rejection. What is important is when I have found my understanding of the faith. Christianity is a path to faith. It’s not something that shifts from one day to another.

In contrast to Jamshid, Aref had lived as an atheist in Afghanistan, which proved to the Migration court that he could pass as a Muslim and thus did not need protection because of his (lack of) religious beliefs and the corresponding threats posed to him. Hence, while timing was used against Jamshid insofar as he had converted too late and thus his rationale was constructed as unfounded, Aref’s timing gave him legitimacy, though was also used against him as lacking in need of protection. This paradoxical temporal logic reflects a European approach to dispossessing others who are perceived as belonging to a different racial time. In this framing, certain groups are seen as belonging to both a different place and timeframe, dooming them to be dispossessed of their contemporariness (Khosravi, 2019). Jamshid not only arrived too late at his faith, as a racialised ‘other’ he would never arrive on time.

A central aspect of enforcing the law was to make timing a central issue, with the 24th November 2015 serving as an important date of demarcation. However, timing also became central to the distribution of rights, within the government’s narrow timeframe. This is illustrated by Amin, who applied for asylum before the 24th November 2015, and thus expected to receive a PRP, as had those with whom he had arrived in Sweden. Arriving before the 24th November had been portrayed as insurance for having your case assessed in accordance with the old migration law (the Aliens Act) in which permanent protection was the guiding rule. However, when he received his residence permit a week after the temporary law was enforced in June 2016, his residence permit became temporary. This was an experience Amin shared with Mourhaf and Ali, all of whom arrived well before the 24th of November 2015, yet had case officers who reported their asylum decisions after the new law was applied in June 2016. Hence, timing cuts both ways, such as how it is constructed, assessed, and interpreted within the asylum narrative, but also case workers’ timing and how this interacts with legal deadlines. However, it is important to note that while time and timing should be understood as tools of governance within state practices, bureaucracy and time can also provide a space for defiance. Case officers’ agency in enacting timing as a strategy of resistance was illustrated by how Swedish Migration Agency officers accelerated their work processes just prior to implementation of the temporary asylum law, hence granting a larger proportion of PRP before TRP became the main rule (see Carlsson & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2019). In that sense, while I argue that time and timing in the context of migration bureaucracy become disciplining mechanisms, and an illustration of contemporary expressions of global capitalism and corresponding processes of dispossession (Harvey, 2004; Ramsay, 2020), it is also important to emphasise their roles in defying policies at a general level, as well as enabling local practices of resistance.

Discussion

Engaging with how migration bureaucracy in Sweden invokes different temporal logics as a means of dispossession, I have sought to illustrate how temporal governance dispossesses people from their life chances. Elaborating on NPM as a neoliberal logic that constructs time as a scarce resource, institutional norms of acceleration shape state officials’ processing of asylum cases, and in turn, withholds frames of intelligibility from those having sought asylum. Hence, while state officials are pushed to adhere to a commodified time that is continually measured, rushed, and restrained, those seeking asylum are continually positioned as ‘outside of time’ through temporalities that renders it impossible to be in time. Neoliberal timeframes are thus central in the allocation of disposability. This is seen in legal amendments applied retrospectively, centralising the issue of timing of asylum applications, and the time politics of the asylum hearing, which all contribute to the assigned disposability of asylum applicants. From the perspective of ‘racial time’, asylum applicants are dispossessed with arguments of ‘having waited too long’ or ‘not having waited long enough’ to have asylum claims read as intelligible and thus credible. The analysis herein clarifies the relational character of time as a mechanism of control that dispossesses both state officials and those seeking asylum, with very different effects on the life chances for each. For the state officials, this is an issue of securing their continued and future livelihood. For those seeking asylum, it is an issue of securing their current and future protection from threats of expulsion and violence. Hence, neoliberal restructurings and corresponding temporal politics have implications for welfare bureaucracies in general, and social work in particular, where contemporary bureaucratic ideals of NPM, efficiency, time governance, and disposability, affect the relationship and encounters between welfare officials and the groups they are supposed to support, and how politics of time becomes central to the distribution of life chances.

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Sarah Philipson Isaac

Sarah Philipson Isaac is a PhD in sociology at the department of sociology and work science at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Her research interests focus on neoliberal restructurings of the welfare state, and the precarisation of life through the frame of temporal governance, with particular focus on migration and migration regimes. She approaches her research topics through ethnographic methods and through theoretical commitments within critical border studies, racial capitalism, black, and postcolonial feminism. She also has a research interest in practices of defiance, focusing on Foucauldian perspectives on power, resistance, and in/exclusions.