Lived experiences of Swedish asylum policy among unaccompanied young people and social workers in a non-governmental organization

ABSTRACT

This article aims to explore lived experiences of the asylum process in Sweden from the perspectives of unaccompanied young people and social workers who work with these young people during a period when Swedish asylum-laws went through a transformation. Young people are expected to become ‘integrated’ and create a sense of belonging in Sweden within a temporary perspective, and the social workers are supposed to work towards integration during more prolonged waiting times and more restrictive asylum politics. The article is based on interviews with young people with current or recent experience of the asylum process and social workers in a non-governmental organization. The results are centred around three themes: (1) the deportable young person; (2) time and waiting; (3) the contagious deportability and state of waiting. These are related to the asylum process from both the young people’s perspectives and how the social workers experience and talk about the young people’s situations. The findings show that the asylum-law changes have created an imminent threat of becoming deported, which puts young people in a state of deportability. There are demands to both wait and ‘integrate’ during this time, which is understood as a paradox of waiting. The deportability is also contagious, affecting the social workers who are supposed to provide support with integration in the middle of the precarious time the state of deportability and waiting creates.

KEYWORDS:

• Unaccompanied young people
• asylum
• deportability
• time
• waiting

Introduction

It’s like, imagine you have a wound and a bandage on that wound. If I have it, I might not think about it because it doesn’t hurt, it’s just, it’s a wound there, but if I come here and you talk to me about this, it’s like you fiddle in my wound and then it hurts, and then I think about it.

This quote was made in spring 2017 by a social worker in a mentoring programme for unaccompanied young people run by a non-governmental organization (NGO) in Sweden. He was referring to what one of the young people in the programme had recently told him about talking to other people about being within the asylum process. Although the programme aimed to support young people towards becoming ‘established’ in Sweden, many young people were still awaiting their asylum claim decisions. This wait and its inbound uncertainty affected the young people themselves, but it also affected the social workers and their work. Another effect, both on the waiting times and everyday life, can be traced to the spirit of the time. During this time, temporality became the new norm in Sweden based on the idea of ‘the refugee crisis’.

After a surge in asylum applications in Sweden in 2015, ‘the refugee crisis’ became somewhat a slogan used in the media and by some politicians to promote closed borders and more restrictive asylum laws. However, this ‘crisis’ had less to do with the crisis that people forcibly on the move are experiencing themselves and more to do with an assumed crisis of the territorial space, that is, the imagined crisis is rather about a politically perceived crisis where Sweden’s borders and sovereignty are threatened by migrants. With this ‘refugee crisis’ as a background and an argument of a ‘collapse of the system’, the Swedish alien law changed and became more restrictive in 2016. Initially, this change was claimed to be temporary, but it was later made permanent, a development described more in detail below.

The restrictive law has had a particularly negative effect on unaccompanied minors (Elsrud 2020). The deportable state these young people are placed within, due to the harsher policies and decisions related to the law changes, pushes them into a state of waiting and precariousness. They are further expected to and left trying to live up to individual demands to adapt, ‘integrate’ or become ‘established’ under a constant threat of being deported (Moberg Stephenson 2021; Wernesjö 2019). Being put in a state of deportability reproduces a precariousness (cf. Sager 2011; Sager and Öberg 2017), and a constant state of being categorized as either a ‘rightful’ member of society – a citizen, or as a rightless non-member – the alien (De Genova and Peutz 2010).

In the last couple of years, we have witnessed increased research on young people’s experiences of harsher migration policies in Europe (Herz and Lalander 2021; Djampour 2018; Elsrud 2020; Wernesjö 2020, among others), suggesting crucially negative experiences for young asylum seekers. During the asylum process, many young people turned eighteen, losing the right of being granted asylum on the grounds of being children. The effect is that they either received a decline or, at the most, a temporary residency, and they also lost the right to support and social care as children (Elsrud 2020). Elsrud (2020) suggests that the Migration Agency situates these young people in a condition of a lack of hope and opportunities for agency, a position of ‘social death’ (see also Roos 2021).

However, as the temporary asylum law has been made permanent in the Swedish parliament in 2021, it is essential to examine further how the asylum policy and application process was experienced by young people affected by these changes in the first place. We would argue that this can indicate how the permanent asylum law might affect young asylum seekers in general. But also, how it affects the experiences of social workers expected to work with issues of ‘integration’ and ‘establishment’ in a time when young people are put in a state of deportability. The parallel effect on social work is not as much explored (see however Kohli 2006; Nordling 2017), especially not from the perspective of the young people and social workers combined. This article focuses on unaccompanied young people who were waiting for a decision of their asylum claim or had recent experience of this process and social workers within an NGO mentoring programme who worked directly with this youth group during 2017–2018. During this period, the effects of the temporary law were notable, allowing us to find out about the impact on the young people themselves and the social workers.

For this article, we have interviewed young people participating in this mentoring programme and the social workers employed in the programme. The interviews were collected as part of a research project studying unaccompanied young people’s belonging, and the work carried out by the NGO to mentor the young people and support them to belong, that is, to become ‘established’ or ‘integrated’ in Sweden.

The aim is thus to explore lived experiences of the asylum process in Sweden from the perspectives of unaccompanied young people and social workers who work with these young people during a period when Swedish asylum-laws went through a transformation. It is essential not only from how young people are expected to become ‘integrated’ and create a sense of belonging in Sweden within a temporary perspective. It is also essential to find out how social workers are supposed to work towards integration during more prolonged waiting times and more restrictive asylum politics.

From a moral superpower to closed borders

Sweden has a reputation of being somewhat of a ‘moral superpower’ (see Dahlstedt and Neergaard 2016; Djampour 2018), a country where human rights are fulfilled, and it has been possible to get asylum and find safety. Although this image of Sweden never really was true, it is a popular image evident in international debates and common as a self-image within Sweden. During 2015 when a large number of migrants fled to Sweden simultaneously, approximately 160.000 (Swedish Migration Agency 2021), a political backlash to this self-image occurred. To prevent people from accessing Sweden, the Swedish government more or less closed its borders and talked about the need for a ‘breathing space’ (Herz and Lalander 2021). One effect of this breathing space was the introduction of temporary changes to the Swedish alien law, as described above. By using the surge of asylum applications the previous year and the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ as arguments, the law was possible to change.

The new temporary law prioritized temporary rather than permanent residence permits, made it harder to be granted family reunification, and put more demands on the individuals seeking asylum to care for themselves financially and socially. One example is how asylum seekers could only receive a permanent residency if they had employment with a wage high enough to fully support themselves (see SFS 2016, 752). If the requirements for permanent residency were not met when the temporary residency ran out, deportation would be the next step.

Young people seeking asylum without the company of their parents were significantly affected by this harsher migration policy, not only regarding family reunifications and stricter demands on the asylum seekers themselves but also through specific demands aimed at young people. One such example is the so-called ‘new high school law’ (nya gymnasielagen), which was introduced to deal with delays in decisions for young, unaccompanied minors, but that also created further requirements to pass. The ‘new’ high school law was not referring to a new law but to a new paragraph (16 f § begränsningslagen). The new paragraph made it possible for young people who would have been deported but are either 18 years old or will turn 18 years old to get 13 months temporary residency when studying at a high school level. After 13 months, it would be possible to further extend the temporary residency through existing regulations within the ‘old’ high school law, either for studies or work. The changes, intended to make it easier for young people affected by long waiting times, led to a reduction in their asylum rights since the law was designed as a residence permit for studies, not protection or security (Roos 2021). For the young people themselves, the changes meant more considerable demands put on them to pass their educations individually and to find a steady job within a narrow time frame, not to risk deportation.

Since these temporary changes took place, they have, as mentioned, in large been permanented. It is still impossible to know the full effects of these changes, but it is possible to explore the first changes after 2015. In this context, the people met in this article live their everyday lives, and the social workers are expected to carry out social work with young people affected by the changes first-hand.

Deportability and time

Theoretically, we place our analysis within a research tradition focusing on the concepts of deportability and time/waiting among asylum seekers. Both concepts are at the core of the legislative changes described above, and both are related to the exercise of power. Deportability captures a constant position of being a person possible to deport, where all you can do is to wait and see. In previous research, both concepts have been used to analyse the precarious situation of asylum seekers (e.g. Collyer 2018; De Genova 2002; De Genova and Peutz 2010; Sager 2011; Sager and Öberg 2017), but also to analyse the relationship to the State and the asylum system (e.g. Khosravi 2017).

It is deportability, then, or the protracted possibility of being deported – along with the multiple vulnerabilities that this susceptibility for deportation engenders – that is the real effect of these policies and practices. Deportation regimes are profoundly effective, and quite efficiently so, exactly insofar as the grim spectacle of the deportation of even just a few, coupled with the enduring everyday deportability of countless others […], produces and maintains migrant ‘illegality’ as not merely an anomalous juridical status but also a practical, materially consequential, and deeply interiorised mode of being – and of being put in place. (De Genova and Peutz 2010, 14)

According to De Genova and Peutz (2010), the actual effect of these legislative changes should be considered the very possibility of being deported, putting people in a deportable state. They are being ‘put in place’ from the constant fear of being deported. As such, deportability is an effective means of power that can undermine social and political resistance since all resistance might lead to you being deported. Deportability places people in a precarious state in terms of possibilities to work, get a place to live, feel safe, and be able to maintain social contexts (Sager 2011).

Deportability not only affects people de facto facing deportation or a threat of deportation, but it also affects others. Deportability is contagious (Sager and Öberg 2017). People with a residence permit might feel the risk that they are next in line for deportation, but other people around the deportable also feel the effects of deportability.

Deportability is related to how people, through means of power and the State and its societal structures, can be more or less deportable. This argument is not to say that people considered deportable are all the time unwanted by the State. As De Genova and Peutz (2010) have suggested, ‘deportable populations’ are not only objects of the State’s power to exclude but also included in a state as disposable labour (cf. Farris 2017). It could be argued that temporary residence permits create disposable labour forces. Unless asylum seekers get into the labour market and receive a steady income, or in other words, prove themselves of being ‘deserving’ of residency (Wernesjö 2020) and thus have a chance to a permanent stay, they are deported. For unaccompanied young people in Sweden, the past five years, proving their worth by completing their education in time and being employed within a specific time frame after, have been vital to avoid deportation.

We suggest that the everyday life of deportability means acting within a limited time frame – as when finding a job in time and waiting for a final decision to stay or be deported – that might never come. Khosravi (2014) argues that keeping people waiting is a technique used to regulate social interaction, and that keeping people waiting without ruining their hope is an exercise of power over people’s time (see also Bourdieu 2000). Waiting is, as Bourdieu (2000) argues, to experience the effects of power.

One can understand asylum seekers waiting as they are ‘stuck’ in time, or as Hage (2009) puts it that they are in a situation of ‘stuckedness’. For someone not knowing the duration of waiting, the wait can cause uncertainty, shame, depression, and anxiety (Khosravi 2014). Hage (2009) defines stuckedness as a lack of agency as there are no choices or alternatives to a person’s situation. Hage also argues that for someone to be seen as a good citizen, this situation of stuckedness needs to be ‘waited out’, and that people not knowing how to endure the wait is considered part of a ‘lower class’ (2009, 78).

Deportability and the temporality of waiting and time-management discussed above are manifested as societal structures framing the ability to ‘integrate’ and work for ‘integration’. This frame might concern the very possibilities and challenges facing the young people when trying to build a liveable future and the work done by the social workers in supporting the young people.

Method

The empirical data for this article have been collected within a research project about unaccompanied young people’s belonging and the work of the NGO mentoring programme described in the introduction. Ethical approval was granted by The Regional Ethical Review Board in Uppsala, Sweden (No. 2017/036).

The data was collected in the youth centre where the mentoring programme took place between March 2017 and June 2018. During this period, eight social workers were employed by the NGO. It was five women and three men of various ethnicities and ages. They are all included in this study. The young people participating in the mentoring programme at this time were between 16 and 21 years old. They had fled from various countries unaccompanied by parents or other caregivers to apply for asylum in Sweden. Eleven of them participated in this study, and of them are five young women and four young men from Somalia, and two young men from Afghanistan. They were all verbally and in writing informed about the research project and gave their written consent to participate before any data was collected. Although this is a small sample of participants within a specific context, they provide us with an insight into how young migrants’ lived experiences can be affected by the impacts of a transforming asylum policy. Connecting these experiences with the theoretical constructs of deportability and time provides us with an analysis relevant within this specific context and possibly to other national and social contexts.

This article includes data from individual interviews with the young people and the social workers. As part of the research project mentioned above focusing on young people’s belonging and mentoring work over a period of time, the first author interviewed the young people twice. However, this article focuses specifically on the interviews covering experiences of the asylum process. The first time between March and September 2017, all eleven young people took part in the interviews. They had all been in Sweden for more than one year. Six were still awaiting a decision on their asylum claim, while five had been granted residency. In June 2018, a second interview was carried out with seven of these young people. Three of them had then received the first decline, one had been granted a residence permit, and the other three already had a residence permit the first time we met. The other four young people interviewed the first time did not want to participate in another interview or had left the mentoring programme, and we could not get hold of them. All interviews were carried out in a separate room at the youth centre, apart from two at the second occasion. One interview was carried out in a hotel lobby, and one interview took place via an email conversation. The interviews with the social workers were carried out in April 2018. These took place individually on Skype by the first author. Doing the interviews through Skype was the most suitable option because it was a hectic period at the workplace, and this solution made it possible to plan the interviews on short notice.

Interview guides consisting of themes with open-ended questions have been used for all interviews (cf. Davies 2008), where the questions were different for the young people and the social workers. The themes discussed with the young people were social relations, places, identity, belonging, and everyday life. Although never an explicit theme, for many, their daily lives revolved around their migration experience and asylum policy. For the social workers, the themes focused on their experiences of working with the mentoring programme, the young people’s social relations, identity and belonging, and asylum policy. The questions could be modified, and new questions were sometimes introduced during the interviews based on the participants’ narratives (cf. Davies 2008). The interviews lasted for approximately 60 minutes and were recorded and later transcribed verbatim. All names and places are fictive to protect the young people and social workers’ identities.

The data is analysed by thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke 2006). First, we read all transcripts from the interviews with the young participants and identified themes related to the asylum process from their perspectives. Second, we read the social workers’ interview transcripts to find how they experienced and talked about the young people’s situations related to the asylum process. We also searched for similar themes identified from the young people’s interviews. Third, we read all the transcripts amass, focusing on the themes identified in the first two steps, which were associated with the experiences of waiting for a decision and receiving a decline, all of which related to a state of deportability and time in various ways. This way, we could compare the findings with the theories related to deportability and time described above. The analysis finally resulted in three themes: (1) the deportable young person; (2) time and waiting; (3) the contagious deportability and state of waiting. These are described next, where the focus is first on the young people’s experiences of the asylum process, followed by the social workers’ descriptions of how the young people experience and are affected by the asylum process and policy.

The deportable young person

The effects of the asylum policy and the waiting for a first, second or final decision of the asylum claim can be understood as being put in a deportable state. Furthermore, the refusal of so many young people’s application for asylum following the ‘begränsningslag’ (law of limitation) created a feeling among many young people that they also were going to be deported rather than granted a residency. Deportability was, as such, always present among the young people within their everyday life.

These effects are evident for Khadra, a young woman from Somalia. She told us that the arrival of the first refusal was the single most defining moment of the past year. She explained her feelings of worry when she received the decision and did not manage to go to school for a week. During our talk, she had appealed the decision and had a date set at the migration court for another hearing. This process changed her mood. She said that even though she did not feel angry herself, her friends described her as very angry the past four months because of the refusal decision. Thus, even with the knowledge that they can appeal a refusal, many young people worry that the next decision may mean deportation.

For others, deportation was even more impendent. We asked Reza, from Afghanistan, who just had received the first refusal, what he would do if he was not allowed to stay in Sweden:

Reza: I do not know. I can’t go back to my home country. Maybe go to another country, or stay, I can’t stay here. I can’t live here illegally, so it’s not possible.

Reza tells us how he cannot go back to his country of origin or stay in Sweden. Being deportable clearly creates confusion and a sense of not being safe for Reza. He continued by talking about how the working conditions would be, that it would be hard to find a job and that he would be forced to work illicitly. Reza did not see a possible future living under such conditions as an undocumented migrant in Sweden. Should he not get a residence permit in Sweden, he would be forced to leave and try again in another country.

Nader from Afghanistan provides a similar statement. The first time we met him in 2017, he talked about his atheism and how he is outspoken about it on social media. When Nader lived in Afghanistan, he questioned Islam and religious belief, even if people were supposed to believe and not oppose Islam openly. This situation created an imminent threat to his safety, which is why he fled to Sweden and applied for asylum.

Nader: Yes, I must believe in […] What can you do. Many times, I tried to talk about this. I have many questions in my mind, [no one] answers me, and many times I asked about all this, and it’s … nobody can answer … And they don’t want you [to] think, and you can’t ask about gods, about religions, and … you must believe without thinking, without questions. Yes … All the time, they think it exists, and you don’t need to think, and you don’t need to question, and you must accept and believe. If you don’t believe, you must die. What can you do?

When we met Nader during this time, he was still waiting for a decision on his asylum claim. For Nader, going back to Afghanistan was never an option, and for him, a possible deportation decision would mean that he had to go back to a country where people wanted him dead. In the summer of 2018, we were in touch with Nader again. Now, he had received a refusal of his asylum claims in Sweden.

Nader: The foreign office refused [the asylum claim] and said, ‘we think you’re an atheist, but you can live in Kabul and Herat, two of Afghanistan’s big cities’! That was very unfair! In a country where Muslims are killing each other because of the slight difference in their faith, how can one have an atheist who doesn’t believe in God and the prophet and his holy places without difficulties? After having left Sweden, I went to Germany, and two months later [due to the Dublin agreement, he would have to go back to Sweden], so when I received the letter, I had to leave Germany […].

The imminent threat of deportation back to Afghanistan forced Nader to take charge of his own situation and leave Sweden, something common among many young asylum seekers at the time (Elsrud 2020). After having had an unsuccessful asylum claim in Germany, he chose to keep fleeing, this time to France. He did not want to return to Sweden because him being considered deportable in Sweden. However, due to the Dublin agreement, he could not make a new claim for asylum in France straight away without risking deportation to Sweden. Therefore, he chose to stay in hiding while waiting for the possibility to apply for asylum again in France. His situation was affected by a double deportability – would he be revealed he risked deportation to Afghanistan and Sweden.

In this section, we have shown how the asylum process creates an imminent possibility of being deported, which puts the young people in a deportable state (cf. De Genova and Peutz 2010). Within such a state, the young people must manage and navigate the possibility of being separated from their everyday lives and preparing for a precarious life without any chance to plan ahead. Thereby, the deportable state puts people in place (ibid.) and contains aspects of being put into waiting for a future that might never arrive. Both Reza and Nader provide examples of how their only alternatives are either being deported or waiting for a possible changing decision. During this time of waiting and deportability, it gets hard to maintain a sense of safety and hope for a future, putting the young people in a precarious state of waiting (cf. Sager 2011).

Time and waiting

This section will focus on how the asylum policy and the process of applying for asylum affect the young people. We argue that deportability puts the young people in a state where all they can do is wait, either wait for a decision or wait to be expelled. This at the same time as they are expected to plan for a future of ‘integration’. Reza, whom we met in the previous section, is one example of how waiting permeates deportability and the asylum process.

All the young people we talked to had to wait in some sense or another, but some young people at the time also had to wait to see if they were applicable to a temporary law related to young people in high school. As mentioned above, this new law made it possible to get a temporary residency if you went to high school. Reza was one of these young people. He had been in Sweden since November 2015. When we first met him in spring 2017, Reza was still waiting for the first decision. Later, in February 2018, he received his first refusal. He appealed the decision and was thus waiting again for the second decision.

Reza

Yes, I mean, you must wait a long time. I mean, the process is so slooooow, so slow [makes a slow swishing sound] … And you must wait longer until the new law’s coming, the’ Gymnasielagen’. And there’s, I mean, I’m thinking of that, there are three ways to receive a residence permit here in Sweden. If I would arrange myself in three boxes, if you understand? I mean, I thought that OK, I would study now. I’ve been to school, and I’ve received some grades and that. And I have a plan for my education, to get a certificate from school, everything’s done. And it’s a shame that I registered at the Migration Agency on 25th November. That’s a real shame. And the law states that those arriving before 24th November are eligible. The difference’s just one day.

Maria

One day?!

Reza

Yes. And [left it] about one week or five-four days before I registered in the Asylum Agency, in the group home [outside Gothenburg]. And we were going to, I mean, it was my legal guardian who sent an email to the municipality to help me find some registration from the first home. What date I came to Sweden. And in that case, then I can apply for the [High school law].

Reza was affected by the Swedish asylum policy on several different levels. He had the experience of the long waiting times, as he had been in Sweden for more than 2.5 years and was also personally affected by the quick policy changes and complicated bureaucracy of asylum handling in Sweden at the time, which further added to the impacts of waiting.

Regardless of living under deportability, all young people express in some shape and form different goals and dreams. Furthermore, they are all at the age where they are expected to be moving from school to work, actualizing the question of what future would be possible and desirable. Both Nader and Khadra, whom we introduced in the previous section, had specific dreams for the future but expressed that they do not know what they can do without knowing where they are allowed to live. Khadra added that she did not consider she lived in Sweden ’for real’. Returning to Reza, he was dreaming of becoming a dentist in the future, but this dream, similar to Nader and Khadra, was also conditional:

Reza: In Sweden, you must have a residence permit to become a doctor. You must have money. You must, you can go to university. And if anyone can help me, I can do it. If I have money, I can do it. If I have, if I get, I hope I get a residence permit. There are ways I can develop. If it does not work, I cannot […].

Waiting for a decision on his asylum application put his dreams on hold. When we met a year later, Reza was waiting for his second decision after the first asylum refusal, and he still wanted to be a dentist. However, it became harder for him to say anything about his future:

Reza: I can’t say anything about the future because now I’m waiting to be told that I am an asylum seeker. And, if you don’t understand your future, whether you should stay in Sweden or not, how could you decide […] But I have not decided now any particular goal or so.

After a year of rejections and waiting, Reza’s goals and dreams have changed, and he could no longer say anything with certainty. Instead, he was put in a position of waiting again, this time for a new decision. Even if there were some senses of hope among all the young people, their dreams and thoughts regarding their future still depended on whether they would get a residence permit or not. As long as they were stuck, it was impossible to move forward. Time was, in a sense, standing still, which can be understood in terms of ‘stuckedness’ (Hage 2009).

Being stuck is also evident among those lucky enough to receive a residence permit. Axmed, from Somalia, is one of those having been granted residency. When Axmed first arrived in Sweden, he had very low self-esteem, but now, Axmed said he could think about reaching his dreams when knowing he could stay. Axmed put into words what the uncertainties of waiting can do to the dreams and thoughts of the future. These uncertainties also apply to feelings of home. Roda, who also had been granted residency, said that she mainly felt at home in Somalia, where she came from, but again now, after receiving a residence permit, she also felt at home in Sweden. Roda’s notions illustrate how a sense of home in the country where one resides is conditional and can depend on a positive asylum claim decision.

It is possible to point at a paradox when waiting for residency. The young people are expected to fulfil their education and find a job, to ‘integrate’, at the same time as they are put in waiting and stuckedness making it difficult for them to focus on anything other than their deportability. And, as we will see in the next section, this affects the young people themselves and people around them and people working to help them.

The contagious deportability and state of waiting

In this section, we will turn to the social workers in the NGO working with the young people. The social workers were supposed to help them get ‘established’ or ‘integrated’ in Sweden. Even if the job description was not to work with issues related to asylum claims, these issues were always present within their day-to-day work. The social workers met young people in a deportable situation daily. As will unfold in this section, the state of deportability we have seen among the young people themselves in previous sections was transmitted to the experiences of the social workers.

In all, the social workers talked about similar things related to waiting and time as we have seen from the young people’s own perspective, such as how waiting brings uncertainties into the lives of the young people. They mainly talked about the lengthy asylum process and what it does to the young people as seen and experienced from the social workers’ perspective. One of them explained this position of the young people as being in a vacuum because of the wait. Another social worker clearly was frustrated over how time passed by waiting for the authorities.

Daniel

[One of the young women] is the one who’s been here in Sweden the shortest; she has still been here for a year and a half, and she has not yet received […] I don’t even think she has been interviewed yet. Do you understand what I mean?

Maria

Yes.

Daniel

It’s totally sick!

The frustration and the wait evident among the ‘deportable’ young people themselves seem to be contagious and affect the social workers. It can be argued that although they are not themselves exposed to deportability, they do experience its effects, including waiting through and with the young people they meet. Several social workers talked directly about how asylum laws quickly change, closed borders, complicated bureaucracy, and negative impacts on human rights.

Daniel

That’s why Sweden has received that much criticism as well – both for the temporary Aliens Act but also for the long waiting time. And received very harsh criticism from the EU as well. And these law firms who are currently writing an evaluation of the Temporary Aliens Act are also very critical. Well, you knew that from the beginning. It sounds like a cliché, but this will be in the history books as a black mark like. That’s how it is. It’s not about giving everyone an amnesty. I can think that personally, but I don’t think that’s what the big thing will be – ‘Sweden did not receive all refugees’, kind of. That’s not what will stand the test of time, rather, like: ‘Sweden’s bureaucratic piss-system turned down the principle of human rights’. […] The long processing times, the lack of humanity, the lack of, like, for example [one of the young men] who gets rejected even though he can show both torture injuries … So, you know … There’s no human being who needs protection as much as he. But they say they don’t believe him because he’s ‘Fuzzy’ like. Yes, but he’s ‘fuzzy’ because he’s stressed, like, and lives with trauma, sort of. But there’s something wrong with the system.

The state of temporality where time stands still also seems to be contagious. As with the young people themselves, the social workers also emphasize the stuckedness. One of them explained this by referring to what some young people leaving Sweden to apply for asylum elsewhere express.

David

‘I’m not going anywhere, I cannot even get a bank account, what is this?’, as well as ‘I cannot work I cannot.

The frustration for not being able to work, study, plan for their future, and feel safe is to some extent shared among the young people and their social workers. Even if the young people must take the consequences, the effect on the social workers and their work is evident. Especially since their assignment is to work to help ‘integrate’ or ‘establish’ young migrants. As Sarah puts it, the wait and deportability create ambivalence among the young people whether they can stay or not.

Sarah: And so, there’s a long wait, so it creates a vast, incredibly large ambivalence among them, like this; Should we invest? Shall we not invest [in this]? Shall we be here, or not? So, of course, it haunts them, like.

These feelings and uncertainties are affected by a short-sightedness in decisions and legislation, not least through temporary laws (which have since been made permanent). One social worker pointed out that temporary permits only mean a prolonged wait for the final decision, which is not necessarily a decision to stay in Sweden.

Sophia

Yesterday, when I talked to the [other social workers], they said that basically [people with temporary residency] and asylum seekers are in the same situation because they still risk being deported.

According to the social workers, being deportable and in waiting creates ambivalence and haunts the young people. This deportability is present while the social workers are hired to work together with the young people for a possible future in Sweden. The frustration and stuckedness (Hage 2009) among the young people seem to be contagious to the social workers (cf. Sager and Öberg 2017), where time is on hold for a possible future that might never be true. As such, not only does this stuckedness affect the young people – although the effects on the young people are much more severe – but also on the social work supposedly being put in place to help the young people ‘integrate’ or become ‘established’. Herein lies a challenge also for the social workers being employed to help the young people.

The paradox of waiting and deportability

In this article, we have explored lived experiences of the asylum process in Sweden from the perspectives of unaccompanied young people and social workers who work with these young people to help them become ‘integrated’ or ‘established’.

Young people seeking asylum in Sweden after 2015 are affected by the toughened asylum laws and routines applied as a response to the ‘refugee crisis’, which is when many refugees applied for asylum over a short period. Among the young people we have met in this article, the asylum policy changes have created an imminent threat of becoming deported. They all live and act with the impending deportation from their everyday life and possible future. This imminent threat is evident in previous research as well (see De Genova and Peutz 2010). However, as Elsrud (2020) noted, the threat of deportation forces some people to flee through Europe, where they hope to receive residency somewhere else. This continuous flight puts them in a precarious situation where they are at risk of being deported to their country of origin and to Sweden. They experience a double deportability.

To understand this sense of deportability, and sometimes double deportability, time and waiting are of the essence. In one way, the young people are being stuck (see Hage 2009). They are held back by laws, authorities, and politics. During a time of ‘stuckedness’ it is hard to dream or make plans for the future but can also be hard to focus on here and now since it is a constant imminent threat of deportation. However, time is also present in terms of how the young people are expected to use their time ‘right’ to become ‘integrated’. They are expected to finish school and find a job simultaneously as they are put in waiting. We argue that these demands can be understood as a paradox of waiting. They are both told to wait and use their time to plan for a future that might never come.

Since the young people are expected to work towards a possible future in Sweden to become ‘employable’, educated, and ‘established’, it is considered necessary to provide them with a support system (see Moberg Stephenson 2021). However, what becomes evident is that the support system – in this case in the NGO – also becomes affected by the threat of deportation. As Sager and Öberg (2017) argues, deportability is contagious, with the result that it can also affect the social workers when working with the young people. Although issues related to the asylum process are not part of the NGOs tasks, it becomes one impendent reality necessary to handle. Deportability thus affects the young people themselves and their possible futures and the social work available to them. The frustration evident among the social workers reveals the challenges social work faces in a time when the people in need of social support lack fundamental social rights. Should social workers not react to the obstacles placed on people’s social- and human rights, it would be, as Humphries (2004) puts it, an unacceptable role for social work to play. As such, the reactions of the social workers evident in this article can be interpreted as them taking on the responsibility of providing social work in line with people’s fundamental rights.

The new stricter rules and laws were supposedly put in place as a response to a ‘refugee crisis’, but it instead seems to have created it. Maybe not to a nationalistic view of Sweden, but concerning the people affected by it. The refugee crisis is a crisis for the young people in need of asylum and the social workers trying to help them find a place and sense of belonging in Sweden. It is a crisis created by the paradox of waiting and deportability, where the requirements put on young people and social workers are impossible to achieve. It is important to point out that we do not argue that the crisis hits the social workers as hard as the young people, who risk their lives and futures, while the social workers do not. Instead, our point is that the deportability of the young people also affects the possibilities to perform social work. The social workers are supposed to provide support during these young people’s first time in Sweden in the middle of the precarious time the state of deportability and waiting creates. As such, the contagious deportability evident among social workers within a specific NGO may also impact social workers in other areas working with migrants and asylum seekers. In this article, we have seen some of the impacts asylum law transformations can have on young people and social workers. Still, more research is needed on the effects on migrants and asylum seekers themselves and the possible effects such transformations, in general, have on social work and what impact deportability, specifically, has on social work and social workers in different areas.

Acknowledgments

This study was enabled by financial support from Örebro University and SOS Children’s Villages Sweden. The findings and conclusions in this manuscript are those of the authors only.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Örebro University under Grant number Örebro University ORU 5.2-02694/2018; and SOS Children’s Villages Sweden under Grant number SOS Children’s Villages, Sweden K-35 16/16.