Governing through bureaucratically imposed waiting: on stuckedness among asylum seekers and refugees waiting for residence permits in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship has illustrated the importance of time and making people ‘wait’ when governing mobile people, and that ‘waiting’ or ‘stuckedness’ is becoming a condition which characterises many mobile people’s lives. This paper contributes to this research by examining situations of bureaucratically imposed waiting among asylum seekers and refugees waiting for residence permits in Sweden. Specifically, it focuses on the experiences of stuckedness and practices of governing which are produced in these situations. The article is based on in-depth interviews with refugees with current or recent experience of the permit system. Taking the concept of stuckedness as a governmentality as a point of departure, the article highlights how situations of imposed waiting, during different permit processes, give rise to both similar and different experiences of stuckedness and modes of self-governing These include showing patience, with limited social and economic support, when waiting for an asylum decision, and carrying on, by actively trying to become employed, when waiting for permanent residence permits. The findings also illustrate how the permit processes’ production of stuckedness contributes to welfare deterrence, as asylum seekers and refugees are continuously governed towards enduring precarious conditions to earn a secure legal status.

ABSTRAKT

Nyare forskning har uppmärksammat betydelsen av tid och att få människor att ‘vänta’ i styrning av mobila människor, och att ‘väntan’ eller ‘stuckedness’ håller på att bli ett tillstånd som kännetecknar många mobila människors liv. Följande studie bidrar till denna forskning genom att undersöka situationer av byråkratiskt påtvingad väntan bland asylsökande och flyktingar som väntar på uppehållstillstånd i Sverige. Specifikt fokuserar den på upplevelser av stuckedness och styrningspraktiker som produceras i dessa situationer. Artikeln bygger på djupintervjuer med flyktingar med nuvarande eller nylig erfarenhet av tillståndssystemet. Med utgångspunkt i konceptet stuckedness som en styrningsrationalitet belyser artikeln hur situationer av påtvingad väntan, under olika tillståndsprocesser, ger upphov till både liknande och olika upplevelser av stuckedness och former av självstyrning. Dessa inkluderar att visa tålamod, med begränsat socialt och ekonomiskt stöd, i väntan på ett asylbeslut, och att fortsätta, genom att aktivt försöka bli anställd, i väntan på permanenta uppehållstillstånd. Resultaten visar också hur tillståndsprocessernas produktion av stuckedness bidrar till att avskräcka från välfärd, då asylsökande och flyktingar kontinuerligt styrs mot att uthärda osäkra förhållanden för att få en säker rättslig status.

KEYWORDS:

• Refugees
• legal status
• temporariness
• stuckedness
• governmentality

NYCKELORD:

• Flyktingar
• rättslig status
• tillfällighet
• stuckedness
• styrningsrationalitet

Introduction

Recent scholarship has illustrated how migrating people across the world are continuously being thrown into long periods of ‘waiting’ without graspable alternatives, or what can be understood as situations of ‘stuckedness’. As Hage (2009) puts it, stuckedness is an experience of existential immobility, which means a specific kind of waiting in which aspirations for the future are combined with the feeling of going nowhere – physically, socially or economically. According to Hage, this is an experience which permeates contemporary social and historical conditions, where many peoples’ lives are characterised by uncertain living and work conditions. Although globalisation and technological advances have created new possibilities for both physical and social mobility, these possibilities are often hard to achieve due to austerity, neo-liberal politics and strict migration controls (Appadurai, 1996; Khosravi, 2010; Pettit & Ruijtenberg, 2019). This becomes especially noticeable for asylum seekers and refugees waiting for permit decisions or permit renewals, where the future often can seem to rest in the hands of immigration officers and/or employers – a kind of situation that can generate feelings of both hope for the future and hopelessness in the present (Herz et al., 2022; McNevin & Missbach, 2018; Moberg Stephenson & Herz, 2022).

With stricter immigration policies, for example through the European Union member states’ new pact on migration and asylum and more selective permit regulations, protracted periods of waiting have become an integral aspect of many states’ migration controls. Waiting can be used by authorities to facilitate social control and selection processes (Näre et al., 2022; Tazzioli, 2018; Whyte, 2011), through which people are governed towards showing self-control and self-government; to ‘stick it out’ (Hage, 2009). In these ways, periods of imposed waiting can be understood as a governmental tool through which people are encouraged to endure stuckedness, to possibly move forward in the future. This imposed waiting is, as Bourdieu (2000) points out, imbued with power, since people being put on hold can be kept from expecting or demanding more, which can uphold and reproduce societal power relations.

This article explores the ways in which bureaucratically imposed waiting produces governance in our age of more selective permit regulations. Departing from the concept of stuckedness as a governmentality, the aim of this article is to explore the practices of governance that asylum seekers and refugees¹ who seek residence permits face when moving to Sweden. The Swedish setting is interesting as the country has a long history of bureaucratic governance (Burrell & Schweyher, 2021), and the bureaucratic system is often perceived as overtly complex for people seeking residence permits in the country (Moberg Stephenson & Herz, 2022; Spehar, 2021). The article draws on qualitative in-depth interviews conducted in 2020, with refugees who have current or recent experiences with the permit process in Sweden. This material allows me to illustrate how the bureaucratic Swedish state conditions the field of action for asylum seekers and refugees seeking residence permits in Sweden, by producing experiences of stuckedness and practices of governance during different permit processes. Thus, this paper contributes to recent scholarship by generating new knowledge about the function of stuckedness in the governance of migration. The insights are also essential to the field of social work, as they show how the structure of the permit system contributes to deterring asylum seekers and refugees from social support structures. Such insights are important in this field for better assisting people seeking residence permits in a time of welfare austerity and stricter immigration policies.

The Swedish setting

For many years, Sweden was linked to concepts such as being a ‘moral superpower’, which included defending human rights, and having a generous asylum policy and an inclusive welfare system (Dahlstedt & Neergaard, 2019). Following the refugee situation in 2015, when approximately 163,000 people sought asylum in Sweden, this link was weakened when the Swedish government adopted temporary changes to the Aliens Act in 2016. The temporary law included making temporary residence permits the principal rule, instead of permanent permits, restricting the possibilities for family reunification and asylum, and adding an income requirement for permanent residence permits. The overall aim of the temporary law was to deter people from seeking asylum in Sweden, while the aim of the income requirement was to provide ‘foreigners’ with incentives to work (Prop., 2015/16:174, n.d.), while assuming a lack thereof. This requirement meant that an income was needed from either employment of a certain duration, such as full-time employment or fixed-term employment of at least 18 months, or an own business. The income also has to cover the individual’s accommodation costs and the so-called normal amount for a single adult, which is a standard calculation of ordinary living expenses. Thus, refugees with temporary forms of employment, which refugees are often limited to initially, were denied access to permanent residence permits. Consequentially, as access to permanent residence permits became conditional on income and obligatory periods of temporariness, new periods of waiting were institutionalised within the Swedish permit process.

In 2021, the temporary changes were made permanent, while at the same time requirements for three years of stay in the country and good conduct [vandel] were added for permanent residence permits (Prop., 2020/21:191, n.d.). For the people met in this article, these last changes had not been adopted at the time of the interviews. But, as their lives were affected by the similar changes adopted in the temporary law, I argue that this article is helpful in understanding how bureaucratically imposed waiting also affects asylum seekers and refugees who are waiting for residence permits since the changes in 2021.

Asylum seekers’ and refugees’ permit processes are handled within the Swedish Migration Agency [SMA], the state authority responsible for implementing Swedish migration policy. The agency is influenced by bureaucratic ideals of rationality and efficiency, with expectations for permit processes to be conducted at a fast pace (Philipson Isaac, 2022). At the same time, different processes within the permit system recurrently produce periods of waiting. The first permit process, for asylum seekers, consists of an assessment of asylum claims, based on asylum hearings which are inquisitorial in their design (Johannesson, 2018). During these periods of waiting, asylum seekers can either arrange their own housing or stay in accommodation provided by the SMA, which may take the form of reception centres, hotels, or campsites. While waiting, asylum seekers are normally allowed to work, but are not allowed other establishment activities designed to facilitate their participation in work and social life. This first waiting period is often described as being in a state of limbo, characterised by uncertainty (Cabot, 2012; Esaiasson et al., 2022).

If granted asylum, refugees are granted temporary residence permits², access to establishment activities (such as language, education and work training) for 24 months, and, if they have not arranged their own housing, can be provided with housing in a designated municipality. The following permit processes consist of permit renewals, until the person becomes eligible for a permanent residence permit. Following the structure of the permit system, refugees aiming to stay in Sweden are often stuck in the Swedish permit processes for many years.

Stuckedness as governmentality

Theoretically, this paper is placed in the research tradition focusing on the concept of stuckedness in migration governance, where it has been used to analyse the conditions of different categories of people in insecure legal statuses, such as asylum seekers, refugees and workers (see for example Herz et al., 2022; McNevin, 2020; McNevin & Missbach, 2018; Nayar, 2020). Building upon this research, the concept of stuckedness is explored further in this article, by focusing on it from the perspective of governance, where it can be understood as facilitating modes of self-governing focused on self-control and endurance (Hage, 2009).

The concept of stuckedness departs from Foucault’s (1982, 2000) notion of governmentality, which refers to the political reason which informs, and practices and techniques which aim to shape, guide or affect the conduct of a person, groups of people or populations. Hage (2009) discusses stuckedness as coupled with a modern kind of ‘serial governmentality’. That is, ‘a technique of individualising and internalisation of a mode of governing the self’ (2009: 7), through which one is disciplined towards becoming a part of a larger series of isolated entities in a social order. An illustrative example used by Hage is people queuing for a bus at a bus stop, where one is supposed to govern oneself into enduring, showing self-control and waiting in an orderly fashion. Here the queue represents social order, and if the queue moves – which in the regular social order can include regulating access to resources – it will encourage and reward a specific kind of self-government. Thus, being able to endure periods of stuckedness becomes an imperative for people who want to access societal resources.

States such as Sweden, Hage (2009) argues, are influenced by a neo-liberal kind of serial governmentality in the 21th century, in which self-control and endurance is valorised (Hage, 2009). Within this governmentality the ‘good citizen’ is presented as the one who stoically endures and waits in an orderly fashion, even in a crisis. Those who do not know how to wait, or wait too passively as McNevin and Missbach (2018) point out, such as so-called ‘bogus refugees’ who are portrayed as ‘queue-jumpers’, become envisioned as the uncivilised ‘lower classes’. Thus, you must learn to act in an orderly fashion and actively endure situations of stuckedness if you want to be seen as a civilised subject (Hage, 2009). Meanwhile those who do not endure in the right way risk becoming categorised as undeserving. In this way, technologies which follow a neo-liberal governmentality risk reproducing civilisational divides between the ‘good citizens’ and the ‘lower classes’, where only the stoically waiting subjects are recognised as deserving and wanted (McNevin & Missbach, 2018).

Materials and method

The empirical data for this article has been collected as part of a larger research project. The project studied newly arrived people’s experiences of the Swedish reception system when being assigned to municipalities in Sweden for settlement, according to a new dispersal policy adopted in 2016. Ethical approval was granted by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (No. 2020-03218). The data consists of qualitative in-depth interviews with individuals in three municipalities within the western region of Sweden, with current or recent experience of the permit process. The individuals were recruited with the help of officials at the municipal social services’ reception centres, who had been responsible for ensuring that individuals that were assigned to the municipalities got access to housing. Against the background of this previous contact, the officials contacted individuals who had been assigned to the municipalities in 2017, briefly informed them about the study and relayed the contact to me. Individuals who contacted me were then further informed about the study. They were also informed that the officials would not be notified about their possible participation, which was ethically motivated to reduce the risk that their participation would affect any future contact with the municipalities.

Following the recruitment process, twelve individuals chose to participate in the study. They were all informed about the research project, both verbally and in writing, and gave their written consent to participate before any data was collected. All the interlocutors had come to Sweden in 2015 and had been granted a temporary residence permit in 2017. Eight of them were men, of whom two came without any family, one with his partner, and five with their partners and children. The other four interlocutors were women, one who came with her partner and three who came with their partners and children. Prior to coming to Sweden, three of the interlocutors had less than five years of education, five had between five and twelve years of education, and four had more than thirteen years of education, At the time of the interviews, the interlocutors reported a range of 26 to 55 years of age, all of them lived in rented apartments, six had a job, two participated in work training, three participated in education, and one was unemployed. Four of the interlocutors still had temporary residence permits, while eight of them had been granted a permanent residence permit. Eight interviews were conducted in Swedish and/or English, while four interviews were conducted with translators, depending on the wishes of the persons in question. The interviews lasted 120–150 minutes and were recorded and transcribed verbatim. The focus of the interviews was on the Swedish reception system and the migration bureaucracy, rather than the individuals’ life-stories and biographies. Following this focus, all the participants were keen to give their perspectives on the issue, as they all, albeit to different extents, perceived these structures as frustrating and difficult to navigate. All names and places are fictive to protect the interlocutors’ identities.

The theme of waiting during the permit process was identified in the analysis of the data which led to the first report (Jansson, 2021), but was not explored further due to its aim and scope. In this article I have explored this theme more closely using a theoretically informed thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006), which here means I have mainly focused on themes related to how experiences of stuckedness and practices of governance are produced during the permit process, from the perspective of the interlocutors. Although the analysis draws on a small sample of participants within a specific context, I argue the analysis provides insights into how the Swedish migration bureaucracy affects asylum seekers and refugees who are waiting for residence permits.

Results

The following section presents the results of the analysis. The results focus on two main themes, stuck waiting for the first permit and stuck waiting for a permanent residence permit, which illustrate different permit processes in which experiences of stuckedness and practices of governance are produced.

Stuck waiting for the first permit and practices of patience

The initial decision-making process regarding residence permits is often slow when related to claims for asylum, as the process includes multiple hearings, examinations of oral and written information and credibility assessments. As a result of the protracted asylum process, experiences of stuckedness were common among the interlocutors, when they were waiting for their first residence permit. Erhan, a 32-year-old man from Afghanistan, described that he had first been stuck waiting for the asylum hearing for many months, and then had to wait another seven months for his decision, during which he had little else to do but wait:

Erhan: It was very difficult and I had to wait. I look at the Migration Agency’s site every day, to see if the decision had come or not. So I checked it every day, which was a bit of chaos, yes, but it’s done.

Erhan illustrates how the bureaucratically imposed period of waiting became a structuring principle for him during his first years in the country, where all he could do was wait for a change of status on the SMA’s website. This was an experience of stuckedness in which he could not affect the process of waiting, as he just had to be patient and wait his turn, while at the same being active and checking the status of his case on an everyday basis. This practice relates to how Hage (2009) describes stuckedness as including a dual experience of activity and passivity, where the seemingly passive process of waiting also includes an array of activities.

This kind of experience of stuckedness was also evident for Najib, a 48-year-old man from Syria. He told me that the SMA had assigned him and his family to hostels and hotels in the countryside while waiting for a decision, without any available social activities or public transport, a situation which had caused both boredom and stress. Here the waiting was not only a question of an existential immobility, but is also illustrative of a spatial kind of immobility (cf. Massey, 2012), being stuck waiting for any social contacts worth mentioning. Later in the interview, Najib described that he had contacted the SMA and asked it was possible to get help to learn the Swedish language – which he saw as necessary for the future – whereupon they had replied ‘that is not possible now’, as he didn’t have a residence permit. Thus, his and his family’s access to housing, social contacts and education was dependent on them showing patience, until a permit decision was made.

A similar experience was shared by 31-year-old Ali, also from Syria. He illustrated clearly how the process of waiting for a decision gave rise to both geographical and existential immobility, but also became a question of getting access to resources in a wider sense:

Ali: Yes it was a bit difficult. But I managed myself. I just bought food and didn’t go out. Didn’t ride the bus that much because it way really expensive […]. But I walked, looked at nature. It was also a bit strange that I couldn’t study because I didn’t have a residence permit, or wasn’t a child, so it was a bit difficult. I just had to wait for residence permit. Then you get an apartment, your name gets registered at the municipality and then you can study at SFI [Swedish for Immigrants].

Similar to Najib, Ali illustrates how his everyday life was structured by waiting for a residence permit, during which he was both physically stuck at the camp he was living in and stuck in life, not able to access other welfare resources such as housing and language education. In this way, the bureaucratically imposed waiting for a residence permit became a temporal means of regulating access to public resources, clarifying for asylum seekers, such as Ali, that access to welfare provision is reserved for people who are granted residence permits. Thus, the bureaucratic production of stuckedness governs asylum seekers away from welfare and towards precariousness (cf. Jefferson et al., 2019), as the only option given to them is to wait under harsh social and economic conditions. As a result, this kind of temporal governance promotes activities of self-governing, where it is seen as necessary to ‘manage’ oneself and live frugally, as the only way forward is presented in terms of waiting patiently for a decision.

In this section, I have shown how the permit system initially creates an institutionalised period of imposed waiting for people seeking asylum in the country, with subsequent demands for self-governing and self-control (Hage, 2009). During this situation, people in the system must adapt to the bureaucratic system and manage themselves and their time while waiting passively for a decision. Thus, asylum seekers being granted asylum and a residence permit is conditional on them subjecting themselves to an institutionalised period of being able to ‘wait for deliverance’ (Hage, 2009), where they need to practise patience to gain access to the resources which the state controls and distributes – a kind of self-technology of patience (cf. Berlant, 2011; Karlsen, 2020), through which people seeking asylum, regardless of their age and/or social situation, are supposed to put their life on hold and wait under difficult conditions, with limited resources and social support, to gain access to the Swedish society.

Stuck waiting for a permanent residence permit and practices of carrying on

The following sections will focus experiences of stuckedness for refugees who have been granted a temporary residence permit. While being able to move on from the bureaucratically imposed limbo described above, living with a temporary residence permit still means being present in a bureaucratic system characterised by temporal measurements and governance (Cwerner, 2001; Philipson Isaac, 2022). For these people, their lives are still conditioned by a delimited time of stay, the threat of future deportation and further requirements for permanent residence permits, which need to be fulfilled to gain a secure legal status.

Waiting to progress

A recurrent kind of experience of stuckedness which can be produced for refugees with temporary residence permits is related to the possibilities of meeting demands on the labour market. Many refugees who had been waiting for permanent residence permits described becoming stuck waiting to complete Swedish language courses (Swedish for immigrants), which would qualify them for education and/or employment. This is because finding long-term employment is often not possible without proven Swedish proficiency, even with years of work experience (Carlbaum, 2022). This kind of experience was described by Hanin, a 34-year-old woman from Lebanon, who had been a nurse in Syria and was now participating in a specific kind of health and social care education, which included health and social care courses in combination with higher-level Swedish language courses. Although she had been able to pass the lower-level Swedish language courses and gain access to education, she now described being stuck in this education to get to a better future, which I understood as being linked to having a job and a permanent residence permit:

Hanin: It is very difficult, but we must struggle and must understand how to do it here. When I go to education – it’s social care – I don’t know. When the SFI teacher talks to me: ‘What are you planning for the future?’ I do not know. And even now I sometimes think that I don’t want to continue with social care [sigh], but what should I do? […] I don’t know, sometimes I think like I told you; I don’t want to continue. Then no, I want to continue, I want to be in a good place, and I don’t want to just sit at home […] No, I want to be strong.

Hanin’s experience of stuckedness is linked to duality in relation to the future. On the one hand she is uncertain about whether she even wants to continue her education and does not see any viable alternatives for the future, and on the other hand she sees it as necessary to continue with the social care education to become ‘strong’ and get to ‘a good place’ – a place which in Hanin’s case entails resuming a life where she is working, like before she fled to Sweden, rather than ‘just’ sitting at home. Thus, it is seen as necessary for Hanin to ‘wait out’ (Hage, 2009) and carry on under these uncertain conditions, to possibly get to a better future. ‘Waiting out’ can also be understood as a technology of patience, but one which has a different modality than ‘waiting for’. It incorporates a temporal hierarchy of moral worth connected to activities of waiting, where it is possible to wait in a good or a bad way (see also Karlsen, 2020). Since the introduction of the income requirement for permanent residence permits in 2016, the ‘right’ way to wait for this kind of permit is closely connected to the labour market. Refugees with temporary residence permits are supposed to engage in, and carry on with, activities that help them gain employment and an income, if they want to procure better living conditions – a mode of waiting which means that people such as Hanin have to ‘struggle’ under difficult conditions, as it is made necessary to progress within the permit system.

Experiences of stuckedness, similar to those associated with waiting to obtain credentials of language proficiency, could also be produced when refugees tried to obtain the formal education credentials needed to work in a field in which they had competence. This was most evident in the cases where the interlocutors were highly skilled, but their previous education credentials were not recognised as equivalent with the national requirements by Swedish authorities – an experience which was common among highly skilled refugees trying to re-enter their field of expertise in a receiving country (van Riemsdijk & Axelsson, 2021). 48-year-old Najib, who I previously mentioned had waited in hostels and hotels with his family as an asylum seeker, had been working as an engineer and as a university lecturer in engineering and wanted to continue this line of work. When waiting for a permanent residence permit, he described becoming stuck as he needed additional education to re-enter this field of expertise, while at the same time having to be able to provide for his family. At the time of the interview, he explained that the jobs which were available in the city he lived in were not within his field of competency, but he was also not sure if he had the practical possibilities to study.

Najib: There are no jobs here, only jobs in care. It is not good for us, as I have worked as a lecturer in Syria, as an engineer at a university […]. I still want to work as a lecturer, or as an engineer, but it takes a lot of time. Yes, and we live in [small city in Sweden] and if I want to continue, I must study. So, then we must go to Gothenburg. It is difficult for the family to go to Gothenburg and it is difficult for me. Going every day to Gothenburg and studying there is difficult. It takes a lot of time, it’s a lot of work and it costs a lot of money.

Although Najib has a distinct dream of becoming a lecturer or engineer in Sweden, this dream is characterised by uncertainty and doubts, as it is seen as time-consuming, difficult and expensive. Experiences of stuckedness can be a question of lacking viable options, but they can also be about an ‘inability to grab such alternatives even if they present themselves’ (Hage, 2009, p. 100), such as not being able to enrol in education that is seen as necessary to progress in life. In Najib’s case, this inability can be understood as closely intertwined with his life course, as his options are linked to his family situation, finances and previous work experience. If he wants to return to his career as a lecturer, he must commit both himself and his family to a difficult present, in terms of time, energy, money and legal status, which will create an impasse in both his life and the permit process. Meanwhile the Swedish permit system contributes to producing this experience of stuckedness for people with temporary residence permits such as Najib, and it does so without regard to these people’s life courses. Instead, they are supposed to adapt to the demands of the Swedish authorities and wait in the ‘right’ way if they want to gain a secure legal status, by trying to become employable, even if it means committing themselves and their families to difficult situations.

A third type of experience of stuckedness, which was produced in the permanent residence permit process, was becoming stuck waiting for a job that could make them eligible for a permanent permit, even after obtaining the necessary credentials. While some of the interlocutors had been offered long-term employment and permanent residence permits after finishing establishment activities, others were seeking full-time employment at the time of the interviews. Hassan, a 26-year-old man from Afghanistan, was one of these people. He had formal credentials in Swedish proficiency, had been participating in job training and currently had a subsidised job at an industrial company, where the contract only extended until the end of the year. At the time of the interview, Hassan said that he now had to work and then spend his free time ‘looking for jobs’, to be able to obtain a permanent residence permit. As he did not have a partner or family in Sweden, he said it was possible for him to move anywhere and search for jobs ‘[…] in the whole region of Västergötland’. At the same time, he described the situation as ‘very chaotic’ and ‘difficult’, as there were no jobs available in his geographical area, and no companies would get back to him. Like with Najib, Hassan’s situation illustrates how geographical locations with a poverty of possibilities can contribute to feelings of being stuck (cf. McDowell et al., 2022). At the same time, in accordance with the serial governmentality to which Hage (2009) links stuckedness, the permit system demands practices of self-governing and endurance from people with temporary residence permits, who must actively look for a job if they want to stay. While this job seeking activity is demanded from refugees with temporary residence permits in general, it once more illustrates how the waiting in the permit system intersects with refugees’ life courses. People who can be mobile in relation to the labour market, for example young adults such as Hassan, have greater possibilities to progress in the system, in comparison to people who are less mobile, for example due to age, disability or family reasons. In this way, the permit system illustrates that a ‘good citizen’ is supposed to be mobile and available for the labour market, while people who are less available are constructed as less desirable. Thus, refugees with temporary residence permits are governed towards adapting to the needs of the labour market, regardless of their social conditions, to move forward in the imaginary queue for a secure legal status.

Waiting in the ‘wrong’ way

Lastly, I will highlight a prolonged experience of stuckedness which can be produced among refugees who try to obtain a job without meeting the demands of the labour market, for example regarding language proficiency. This was the case for both 45-year-old Hussein and 41-year-old Yousef, who prior to coming to Sweden had a low level of education and had dropped out of the SFI courses as they found them too difficult. Hussein, who had thirty years of labour experience as a welder, describes how the officials at the Public Employment Service [PES] would not help him apply for a job as a welder as he was not able to speak Swedish:

Hussein: I worked as a welder in my country. I feel that here in Sweden I want to work with the same. I really love my profession, as a welder. […] I spoke to the manager and told him: ‘I want to work as a welder’, but he said: ‘No, that’s not possible. Do you want to educate yourself? Or I don’t know, do you want to learn the language?’. When he speak to me, he says that: ‘You don’t understand Swedish. You can’t work as a welder’.

Hussein’s quote illustrates how refugees with temporary residence permits can be excluded from state-organised social support, and stuck in the permit system, if they are constructed as waiting too passively by state authorities, for example by not learning the Swedish language. As scholars reflecting on waiting remind us, there is a ‘politics of waiting’ (Hage, 2009; Straughan et al., 2020), through which waiting and allocation of resources are organised into wider political ways of thinking, where certain modes of waiting are presented as (un)desirable. Hussein’s case illustrates how the waiting in the permit system draws on a permit system with a neo-liberal kind of serial governmentality (Hage, 2009), as the division between ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ kinds of waiting is linked to the individual’s efforts to become employable – a hierarchical division between (un)desirable modes of waiting which promotes individual responsibility and paid work, but does not consider individuals’ social and historical conditions, for example when it comes to age and previous level of education. As a result, refugees with temporary residence permits like Yousef and Hussein, whose previous level of education and age is to their disadvantage in the Swedish labour market, can become stuck in the Swedish permit system for a long time – a prolonged waiting during which they must live with limited access to social support and a constant threat of deportation.

Discussion

In this article I have shown how Sweden’s migration policy and permit system reproduces bureaucratically imposed waiting for asylum seekers and refugees waiting for residence permits, and how these waiting periods promote multiple ways of self-governing.

The study’s results show that bureaucratically imposed waiting is reproduced during different permit processes; first while waiting for an asylum decision and then when waiting to procure a secure legal status. Elaborating on the concept of stuckedness as a governmentality, the analysis illustrates how these waiting periods entail experiences of stuckedness and technologies of patience, i.e. systematic forms of self-governing practices, which are founded on the need for self-control and endurance during undesirable conditions. While previous research on stuckedness has illustrated how these kinds of experiences and technologies are produced in the asylum process (Karlsen, 2020), this article also illustrates how stuckedness can facilitate different modes of governing during different permit processes. During the first permit process, as Erhan, Najib and Ali illustrate, asylum seekers were supposed to patiently ‘wait for deliverance’, with limited social activities, social support and social contact, until state officials decided whether they had the right to access state-controlled resources. During the second permit process, refugees instead had to try to become employable and adapt to the demands of the Swedish labour market to procure a secure legal status. Hence, refugees were now governed to ‘wait out’ the permit process by being active and trying to increase their possibilities of employment, for example by learning Swedish, while living under difficult or even chaotic conditions. Following this governing, the second permit process reproduced a hierarchy of moral worth between ‘good citizens’ who waited in the ‘right’ way, by trying to become employable, and the ‘lower class’ who waited in the ‘wrong’ way, for example by not learning the Swedish language – a hierarchical division which was decisive for the interlocutors’ access to state resources, as the ‘good citizens’ were to be rewarded with a secure legal status, while people who were constructed as part of the ‘lower classes’ could be held in precarious conditions, with limited access to social support. When comparing the two permit processes, it is possible to argue that asylum seekers and refugees are governed towards showing self-control and endurance under difficult conditions during both permit processes. At the same time, I would argue that the governing in the first process is mainly focused on asylum seekers’ subjection to the migration bureaucracy, while the governing in the second process, to a larger degree, focuses on refugees’ subjection to a wider neo-liberal Swedish social order (cf. Dahlstedt & Neergaard, 2019; Schierup & Ålund, 2011), i.e. to become a responsible and working individual who contributes to the Swedish economy, without the need for state support. In this way, the article contributes to the body of research on migration governance, by showing how people seeking residence permits in Sweden can be gradually governed and embedded in societal power relations, through the production of stuckedness during different permit processes.

My findings are also of importance to the field of social work, by illustrating how the production of stuckedness in the permit system also contributes to deterring asylum seekers and refugees from welfare provisions and social support. Making asylum seekers wait with limited access to state resources is one part of this deterrence, while another part is keeping refugees who wait in the ‘wrong’ way in continued legal insecurity, with limited social support. By linking the right to a secure legal status and social support to individual efforts to become employable, following the income requirement for permanent residence permits, paid labour is idealised and rewarded, in contrast to state support which is discouraged. The idealisation of paid labour is a feature of welfare deterrence with a long history, through which people who require state support, such as people with disabilities, can be constructed as burdensome and excludable (Mills & Klein, 2021). As the analysis show, this focus on paid labour disadvantages refugees with temporary residence permits who are less mobile in the labour market due to their life courses and social conditions, such as age, educational background or family situation. Instead, refugees in these situations can be held in precarious conditions and deterred from social support for many years. I would argue that these findings are important for social workers, as they illustrate how vulnerable groups are governed away from social work practices and indicate a need to develop further outreach work that can respond to the specific life courses and conditions of people in the residence permit system.

Acknowledgements

The findings and conclusions in this manuscript are those of the author only. I would also like to acknowledge all the participants for taking part in the interviews. Lastly, I want to thank Zulmir Bečević, Marcus Herz, Kajsa Nolbeck and the the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions to improve the quality of the article.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Funding

This study was enabled by financial support from the County Administrative Board of Västra Götaland.

Notes on contributors

Tobias Jansson

Tobias Jansson is a social worker and has a PhD in social work at the University of Gothenburg. His research concerns social work, immigration and integration policy, constructions of social problems, and processes of inclusion and exclusion in the welfare state. Tobias also has a particular focus on critical theoretical perspectives and research methods.

Notes

1 The Swedish migration policy differentiates between two main categories of asylum: refugees and subsidiary protection. Refugees are defined according to the UN’s definition of a refugee: a person who has a well-founded fear of persecution due to race, nationality, religious or political beliefs, gender, sexual orientation, or affiliation to a particular social group. Subsidiary protection denotes risk of punishment by death, torture or other cruel or inhuman treatment, or being personally at risk of being subjected to random violence or being subjected to external or internal armed conflict or other severe antagonisms. In this article, to make it more readable, the term refugee is used to denote all beneficiaries of international protection.

2 Refugees considered as convention refugees are initially granted permits valid for three years, while refugees granted subsidiary protection are granted permits valid for thirteen months.