Living within temporally thick borders: IT professionals’ experiences of Swedish immigration policy and practice

ABSTRACT

This paper challenges the claim that highly skilled professionals are offered almost seamless mobility and a comprehensive set of rights. Focusing on highly skilled professionals in Sweden’s information technology industry, it argues that just like the lower skilled, the highly skilled may experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status. It explores these insecurities by conceptualising border crossing as a temporal process that begins with the submission of a work permit application and ends with permanent status (or migrant departure) and which, consequently, spans several years. More pointedly, the paper demonstrates that some highly skilled migrants experience several moments of waiting in relation to their admission, labour market access and settlement. These moments of waiting have spatial and temporal consequences in terms of temporary losses of mobility rights, elongated pathways to citizenship, insecurity of presence and feelings of living in limbo. Importantly, the paper shows that the practices of government institutions are every bit as important as legal frameworks in producing these moments of waiting and that it is therefore necessary to extend the analysis of migration management beyond policy analysis in order to more fully appreciate the situation of the highly skilled.

KEYWORDS:

• Highly skilled migration
• migration management
• borders
• time
• waiting

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the workshop ‘Unravelling the Talent Tale: Skilled Migration Policies between National Images, Membership Bonds and Economic Priorities’ at the Faculty of Social Sciences Migration Research Group and Sheffield Centre for International and European Law, 15th September 2015. The author would like to thank the participants, for their comments on the paper. The author would also like to thank Ben Lampert, The Open University, for comments and for proof reading the paper. The author alone is responsible for the contents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. On 1st July 2014, the maximum length of stay on the basis of a work permit was extended to six years.

2. At the time of fieldwork, it seemed likely that the SMB would abandon the certification system.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2013-46339-107809-35]. Support to cover fieldwork costs was gratefully received from Helge Ax:son Johnsons Stiftelse and Kungliga Vetenskapsakademiens fonder.