• Medlemskap
  • Om förbundet
    • Stadgar
    • Värdinstitution
  • Styrelsen
  • Arkivet
  • IMER-konferens 2017

  • Medlemskap
  • Om förbundet
    • Stadgar
    • Värdinstitution
  • Styrelsen
  • Arkivet
  • IMER-konferens 2017

Remissyttrande över utkast till lagrådsremiss

16 Apr 2019
|0 Comment

Från 11 olika lärosäten har 60 forskare med expertkompetens inom IMER-området svarat på Lagrådets remiss om Förlängning av lagen om tillfälliga begränsning av möjligheten att få uppehållstillstånd i Sverige. Här är remissvaret i sin helhet (en lång text):

Remissyttrande över utkast till lagrådsremiss:
Förlängning av lagen om tillfälliga begränsningar av möjligheten att få uppehållstillstånd i Sverige (Dnr Ju2019/00509/L7)

Regeringen varnades vid införandet av Lag (2016:752) om tillfälliga begränsningar av möjligheten att få uppehållstillstånd i Sverige för att lagändringarna som ingick skulle få allvarliga humanitära konsekvenser för människor på flykt. Ett stort antal remissinstanser pekade på den orimligt korta remisstiden och kritiserade regeringen för att man inte gjort någon konsekvensbeskrivning. Inte ens förhållandet till Sveriges internationella åtaganden utreddes. Vidare befarades att inskränkningarna som lagen innebär skulle försätta beslutsfattare i en situation där de inte längre kunde väga in barnets bästa. Så har det också blivit i de allra flesta fallen efter att lagen trädde i kraft. Dessutom har Migrationsverket inskränkt utrymmet för tolkning ytterligare, och drivit på restriktivitetens spiral i lagtolkningen, genom ett växande antal rättsliga ställningstaganden.

En ytterligare kritik i samband med att lagen skulle antas var att dess syfte, att få flera länder i EU att ta ansvar för flyktingmottagande, inte skulle infrias. Idag vet vi att så inte heller blev fallet i verkligheten.

Röda Korset, en av de organisationer som lyfte riskerna med lagen, har vidare konstaterat att ”många av de förutsedda konsekvenserna har blivit verklighet” (Beskow 2018). Efter en egen utredning framhåller organisationen bland annat att ”[d]e tillfälliga uppehållstillstånden leder till en ökad psykisk ohälsa. De försvårar dessutom möjligheterna att tillgodogöra sig vård och behandling av tidigare trauman. Det förekommer till och med att personer som beviljats tillfälliga uppehållstillstånd nekas vård på grund av att sjukvården bedömt att vården måste vara livslång för att ge avsedd effekt” (Beskow 2018, s 5). En av Röda korsets informanter berättar på följande sätt om vad som sker inom människor som nekas en långsiktig trygghet:

”Jag kunde inte känna glädje över att jag fick uppehållstillstånd, det kändes bara som att de bytt tiden på mitt LMA-kort. Nu när jag fått ett års tillstånd känner jag mer stress. Vad kommer hända med mig, måste jag återvända, hur mår min familj?” (Beskow 2018, s 6)

Citatet speglar tydligt de resultat undertecknande forskare ser. Vi delar Röda Korsets slutsats att den tillfälliga lagen med tillfälliga uppehållstillstånd är direkt skadlig för asylsökande i alla åldrar. Många av oss fokuserar på ensamkommande ungdomars förhållanden och det är där vi har vår mest dagsaktuella kunskap. Men samtliga människor som sökt skydd i Sverige sedan 2015 drabbas av den repressiva utvecklingen.

Som framgår av Röda Korsets ovan nämnda rapport (Beskow 2018) och annan svensk och internationell forskning (c. f. Bogic et al 2012; Darvishpour & Månsson 2019; Nickerson et al 2011; Tinghög et al 2016), har de tillfälliga uppehållstillstånden en rad negativa konsekvenser. Bland dem märks psykisk ohälsa, otrygghet, försämrade integrationsmöjligheter, motivationsbrist, försämrade utbildningsmöjligheter och försämrad tillgång till sjukvård. Ett problem idag är att människor med 13-månders uppehållstillstånd som har behov av mer komplicerad vård, nekas denna om vårdtiden riskerar sträcka sig utanför uppehållstillståndets ramar. Våra egna kontakter med ungdomar som har kommit hit utan vuxna anhöriga och som fått tillfälliga uppehållstillstånd på 13 månader eller 3 år, bekräftar de tillfälliga uppehållstillståndens många negativa följer. De berättar att de tvingas leva i konstant otrygghet med risk för utvisning efter 18-årsdagen.

Ytterligare ett problem rör de kraftigt begränsade möjligheterna till familjeåterförening som följt med den tillfälliga lagens införande. Trots de lagar och konventioner som formulerats för att ta tillvara flyende människors rätt till sin familj (se Gonzalez Pascual m fl 2017; Gil-Bazo 2015), så infördes restriktioner med hänvisning till att en nödsituation i Sverige framkallat extraordinära insatser, inklusive rättsvidriga lagjusteringar (Ämtvall 2018). Vi möter många varianter av familjesplittring i vår forskning – barn som tvingas fly från kidnappare, barn som flyr från tvångsäktenskap, hela familjer som splittras när de kommer bort från varandra under flykten. Många lider svårt av längtan efter sina närstående. Många har ingen möjlighet att återvända till de länder de flytt från och är beroende av att länder i Europa efterlever sina konventionsåtaganden.

I forskningen om ensamkommande barn och ungdomars villkor möter vi många ungdomar som har uttömt en stor del av sina psykologiska och sociala resurser. Vi möter ungdomar som har försökt ta sina liv och vi deltar i sorgeyttringar för dem vars försök inte stoppats i tid (se vidare Hagström et al 2018). En del sover ute, andra kan få tillfälligt boende av civilsamhället. Många har varit i Sverige i mer än tre år, men fick vänta i två år eller mer på första avslaget. Många omfattas inte av Nya Gymnasielagen på grund av att de hamnade på fel sida datumgränsen. En del barn som kom före den 24 november 2015, och som därför skulle undantas från de nya restriktiva reglerna, har drabbats särskilt. Det har skett därför att Migrationsverket förmodar att det finns ett ordnat mottagande men utan att utreda närmare om det stämmer. Istället ges barnen förlängd tidsfrist och får fortsatt leva i ovisshet om sin framtid, de vet nämligen att ett ordnat mottagande saknas men detta kan inte bevisas. Vi ser en stor risk för att de drabbade ungdomarna tappar tilltron till Sverige och till sin egen förmåga att kunna påverka sin framtid. Detta försämrar både livskvaliteten på individnivå och integrationsmöjligheterna för samhället. Det är svårt för enskilda ungdomar att i den här situationen av oviss framtid prestera och nå positiva resultat i skola och arbetsliv.

Det är med stor oro vi forskare har följt dessa ungdomars svåra utsatthet. Vi har sett deras livsvilja och energi avta.

Regeringen måste försäkra sig om att denna grupp ungdomar omedelbart fångas upp, får stanna och bereds stöd att påbörja eller fortsätta sina liv. Enligt EUs asylprocedurdirektiv är 21 månaders väntetid på första avslag en absolut yttre gräns för hur länge en asylsökande människa ska tvingas vänta. Ungdomarna har varit tillräckligt länge i Sverige för att ha skapat sig en ny tillhörighet i, och identifikation med, en svensk kontext.

Kritiken mot Migrationsverkets och domstolarnas hantering av asylärenden som rör ensamkommande barn har varit stark. Forskare ser misstänkliggöranden av ungdomar, bristande barnperspektiv och rättsosäkerhet i såväl Migrationsverkets asylbedömningar som migrationsdomstolars beslut (se bl a Hedlund 2016; Johannesson 2017). I Migrationsverkets egen kartläggning av 400 ärenden år 2016 var bara hälften av utredningarna kompletta och 40 procent så bristfälligt skrivna att de var svåra att över huvud taget begripa. I 27 procent av utredningarna var statusbedömningen felaktig, enligt ett inslag med Fredrik Beijer, rättschef på Migrationsverket i Kaliber, P1 (Sveriges Radio, 1 februari 2017).

I forskningstermer beskrivs svenska myndigheters agerande i förhållande till asylsökande barn och ungdomar i termer av en ”misstroendekultur” (”culture of disbelief”, Khosravi 2010). Denna misstroendekultur drabbar inte enbart ungdomar, utan även ensamstående vuxna och familjer. Den tar sig uttryck i stora svårigheter att få sina anspråk på skydd erkända. Jämförande statistik från Eurostat (nd), angående avslag på asylansökningar i första instans, visar exempelvis att Sverige är ett av de länder i Europa som avslår flest ansökningar för sökande från Afghanistan (vilket utgör den största andelen av asylsökande ensamkommande ungdomar i Sverige). Nästan 65 procent av ansökningar inlämnade i Sverige avslogs 2017, detta jämfört med Italiens 7 procent, Frankrikes 16, Tysklands 54, eller Norges 50. Statistik för hela Europa 2018 är inte tillgängliga än, men för Sveriges del har avslagen ökat ytterligare, till nästan 69 procent (Eurostat nd).

Många av de asylsökande ungdomar som vår forskning berör har också varit föremål för medicinska åldersbedömningar (MÅB). Vid det här laget har ett stort antal forskare kritiserat MÅB från etiska, juridiska, medicinska och statistiska perspektiv (se till exempel AIDA, 2015; Malmqvist et al., 2018; Mostad & Tamsen, 2018; Noll, 2016; Nyström 2018; Olofsson et al., 2017; Trysell, 2018). Det finns i skrivande stund inga entydiga bevis på att Rättsmedicinalverkets undersökningar/tolkningar, jämte Migrationsverkets tolkningar av dessa, är vetenskapligt grundade och rättssäkra. Däremot vet vi med säkerhet att många ungdomar blivit felaktigt åldersuppskrivna och därmed har deras avslagsbeslut kommit att grundas på oriktiga uppgifter. Beslut, som innebär att barn berövas tillgång till den bevislättnadsregel eller ’tvivelsmålets fördel’ som de enligt rådande lagstiftning ska åtnjuta, är ett av flera rättssäkerhetsproblem (se även artikel 203, ”tvivelsmålets fördel”, UNHCR 1996, s 58). Ett annat problem är att en del ungdomar har polisanmälts eller riskerar polisanmälan och drabbas av straffpåföljd efter åldersuppskrivning, på grund av påstått bidragsbrott (Skurups kommun har exempelvis polisanmält ensamkommande unga). Dessa ungdomar utsätts för en dubbelbestraffning: Beslutet om åldersuppskrivning kan (om ungdomen sökte asyl före den 1 februari 2017) inte överklagas separat och dessutom riskerar de att polisanmälas.

Mycket talar för att det under senare år har skett förskjutningar i grundläggande rättsprinciper som har lett till allvarliga konsekvenser. Det är oroväckande att de rådande tillfälliga uppehållstillstånden bidrar till en rättsosäkerhet i det svenska asylsystemet – och på detta vis även hämmar en fundamental grundbult i en demokratisk rättsstat, nämligen invånarnas tilltro till myndigheter. Vidare skapar de tidsbegränsade uppehållstillstånden en osäkerhet vad gäller arbetsmarknadsintegrering, som för med sig en ökad prekär status på arbetsmarknaden som varken gagnar de enskilda eller den generella utvecklingen på arbetsmarknaden.

Ett stort antal ungdomar har drabbats av den svenska rättsosäkerheten. De utvisas i skrivande stund med tvång, och med större inslag av våld än vad som tidigare ansågs acceptabelt. Alternativet för många ungdomar i den här situationen är att gömma sig undan myndigheterna eller att fly till något annat europeiskt land och leva i papperslöshet där. En del gömmer sig också fast de har laglig rätt att vistas i Sverige, så lågt har förtroendet för myndigheter sjunkit. Många har alltså redan gått in i en irreguljär status med mycket begränsad tillgång till rättigheter. De vägar som idag står till buds för att kunna överleva präglas av osäkerhet, risk för exploatering, och närmast obefintliga möjligheter att planera sin framtid. I en del fall förekommer även sexuellt utnyttjande och människohandel. Det borde ligga i regeringens intresse att inte förlänga en lagstiftning, vare sig den är svensk eller EU-rättslig, som för med sig att fler människor hamnar i den här situationen.

Vi vill avslutningsvis särskilt fästa uppmärksamhet vid den grupp av barn som inte skulle omfattas av den tillfälliga lagen men ändå, på grund av Migrationsverkets lagtolkning och praxis, har gjort det. Hit hör barn som anlände i Sverige som just barn, men fått vänta så lång tid på beslut att de hunnit fylla 18 år av egen kraft. Istället för att utgå från ålder vid ankomst har Migrationsverket med utgångspunkt i sin långsamma handläggning bedömt dem som vuxna i samband med beslut. Följden har blivit att de dels inte kommit i åtnjutande av ”tvivelsmålets fördel” vid bedömningen av deras asylberättelser, dels nekats det permanenta uppehållstillstånd de som barn, enligt undantagen i den tillfälliga lagen, har rätt till. Många av dem har väntat mer än 21 månader (jfr EUs asylprocedurdirektiv, artikel 31.5). Vi träffar ungdomar som har väntat upp till 33 månader på första avslaget och som straffats genom ett uteblivet uppehållstillstånd. Detta står i skarp kontrast till den legalitetsprincip som ska vara grundläggande i en rättsstat.

En annan grupp som skulle ha undantagits den tillfälliga lagen men ändå inte gjort det på grund av vad som förefaller som mycket godtyckliga bedömningar av enskilda handläggare, är de som varit så unga att de ännu inte blivit vuxna. Dessa barn påstås av Migrationsverket, efter förändringar i olika rättsliga ställningstaganden, ha ordnat mottagande och nekas sedan möjligheten att bevisa att ordnat mottagande saknas. Vi kan exemplifiera med A och M som sökte asyl i september 2015. De var då 14 år. A från Afghanistan har idag avslag från alla instanser med hänvisning till att hans familj befann sig i Ghazni vid tidpunkten för hans flykt och att han därefter vid ett tillfälle haft kontakt med dem, i oktober 2015. Efter att ha flytt från Etiopien som 13-åring och genomgått en medicinsk åldersbedömning som bekräftade hans ålder, väntade M 28 månader på sitt första beslut. M har nu tre avslag och har fått en förlängd tidsfrist för frivillig avresa som gått ut. Han har inte haft kontakt med någon i hemlandet sedan flykten. Migrationsverket var helt passiva i sökandet efter familjen. På detta sätt drabbas även barn som lagstiftaren uttryckligen lovade undanta från de nya restriktiva reglerna av dessa.

Idag utvisas många unga vuxna till Afghanistan. Vi vill hänvisa till frågan som Flyktinggruppernas riksråd (FARR) ställer i sitt remissvar gällande om det alls är rimligt att utvisa 18-åriga afghaner till Kabul och förvänta sig att de kommer att klara sig. De studier som FARR hänvisar till (exempelvis ”Schooled in Britain, deported to danger”, The Bureau of investigative Journalism 15-07-16) visar på en mycket stor utsatthet.

Det är viktigt att framhålla att de barn och ungdomar vi träffar genom vår forskning och i vårt privatliv framträder som en viktig tillgång till Sverige. Så länge de erbjuds möjligheter så går de i skolan och deltar i fritidsaktiviteter. De lär sig svenska på kort tid och bygger upp trygga familjeliv, med både andra människor på flykt och med sina nya svenska familjer. De som får rätt att arbeta gör det med stor entusiasm. Inom omsorgen i en del kommuner beskrivs ensamkommande ungdomar som de mest lyckade rekryteringarna för att de visar de äldre så stor respekt och har mycket kunskap om hur man umgås respektfullt över generationsgränser. De som har varit här en tid bidrar genom att undervisa nyanlända med samma språkbakgrund. De skapar en väg för möten mellan olika ungdomsgrupper och generationer i Sverige.

Det kan också påpekas att utvisning av unga och barnfamiljer som bott lång tid i Sverige är ett inslag i migrationspolitiken som saknar stöd hos allmänheten.
Vi vill också erinra om att rätten till skydd inte med nödvändighet betyder att alla skyddsbehövande som söker sig till Sverige förblir permanent boende här. Många ungdomar vi möter berättar att de vill bidra i framtiden till Afghanistans återuppbyggnad. En del pratar om att de drömmer om att åka tillbaka, när det är möjligt. Även tidigare erfarenheter av flyktingmottagande visar att stora grupper återvänder om och när det blir möjligt. Den utbildning och erfarenhet i arbetslivet som de då tar med sig skulle kunna ge mottagarlandets institutioner goda möjligheter att utvecklas i demokratisk riktning.

Våra sammanfattande rekommendationer är:

• Förläng inte den tillfälliga lagen. Den har redan gett upphov till stor skada för barn, unga – och vuxna – asylsökande. Permanenta uppehållstillstånd har i över trettio år varit en helt grundläggande princip inom svensk asylprövning och tillståndsgivning.

• Om den tillfälliga lagen, trots att den är skadlig, förlängs, så bör permanent uppehållstillstånd beviljas i samband med första förlängningsansökan. Ännu ett tillfälligt uppehållstillstånd kommer att förstärka otryggheten hos en redan otrygg människa. Många människor har nått en punkt där de inte orkar mer ovisshet.

• Om den tillfälliga lagen, trots att den är skadlig, förlängs så bör allmän ”amnesti” utlovas till de ungdomar, barnfamiljer och vuxna som drabbats av långa väntetider och rättsosäkra asylutredningar och MÅB. Detta skulle frigöra mycket resurser till arbete med framtida nyanlända asylsökande samt ge dem som redan drabbats så hårt en chans att återhämta sig, fortsätta sina liv och bidra med arbetskraft.

• Familjeåterförening ska garanteras för de som får flyktingstatus och de som fått statusen alternativt skyddsbehövande. Även de som bor i Sverige med den nya gymnasielagen bör få en rätt till familjeåterförening här. Nödsituationen, i den mån den varit reell och inte i huvudsak retorisk, är över och konventioner och mänskliga rättigheter måste igen få råda.

Referenser:
– AIDA [Asylum Information Database] (2015) Detriment of the doubt: Age assessment of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. AIDA Legal Briefing No 6, European Council of Refugees and Exiles, December 2015.
– Beskow, Linda (2018) Humanitära konsekvenser av den tillfälliga utlänningslagen. Röda Korset, rapport. Billes Tryckeri AB.
– Bogic, Marija, Dean Ajdukovic, Stephen Bremner, Tanja Franciskovic, Gian Maria Galeazzi, Abdulah Kucukalic, Dusica Lecic-Tosevski, Nexhmedin Morina, Mihajlo Popovski, Matthias Schutzwohl, Duolao Wang and Stefan Priebe (2012) ‘Factors associated with mental disorders in long-settled war refugees: refugees from the former Yugoslavia in Germany, Italy and the UK’, in The British Journal of Psychiatry, s. 218-220.
– Darvishpour, Mehrdad. & Niclas Månsson (2019) Ensamkommandes upplevelser och professionellas erfarenheter- integration, inkludering & jämställdhet. Malmö: Liber
– Eurostat (n.d.) First instance decisions on applications by citizenship, age and sex Annual aggregated data. Aggregerad från https://ec.europa.eu/…/asylum-and-managed-mig…/data/database. 20190304.
– Gil-Bazo, María-Teresa (2015) ‘Asylum as a General Principle of International Law’, International Journal of Refugee Law, Volume 27, Issue (1)1 Pp 3–28,https://doi-org.ezproxy.its.uu.se/10.1093/ijrl/eeu062
– González Pascual, Maribel & Torres Perez, Aida (red.) (2017) The Right to Family Life in the European Union. New York: Routledge.
– Hagström Ana, Anna-Clara Hollander och Ellenor Mittendorfer-Rutz (2018, januari 31) Kartläggning av självskadebeteende, suicidförsök, suicid och annan dödlighet bland ensamkommande barn och unga. Rapport. Stockholm: Karolinska institutet.
– Hedlund, Daniel. (2016). Drawing the limits: Unaccompanied minors in Swedish asylum policy and procedure. Stockholm: Stockholm University
– Johannesson, Livia (2017) In courts we trust. Administrative justice in Swedish migration courts. Stockholm: Stockholm University.
– Khosravi, S. (2010). ‘Illegal’ traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan.
– Malmqvist, Erik, Elisabet Furberg och Lars Sandman (2018) ‘Ethical aspects of medical age assessment in the asylum process: a Swedish perspective’, in International Journal of Legal Medicine, 132: 815–823.
– Mostad, Petter & Fredrik Tamsen

Årsmöte

19 Oct 2018
|0 Comment

IMER-förbundets styrelse välkomnar medlemmar till årsmöte
den 9 november 2018 kl 13.00-1500

Plats: Mångkulturellt centrum, Fittja, Lilla mötesrummet, Östra flygeln.

Föredragningslista

1. Mötets öppnande
2. Val av ordförande och sekreterare för mötet
3. Val av protokolljusterare och rösträknare
4. Fastställande av röstlängd
5. Fastställande av att mötet har utlysts på rätt sätt
6. Fastställande av dagordning
7. Styrelsens verksamhetsberättelse för det senaste verksamhetsåret
8. Styrelsens förvaltningsberättelse balans- och resultaträkning) för det senaste verksamhetsåret
9. Revisionsberättelsen för verksamhets-/räkenskapsåret
10. Fastställande av medlemsavgifter
11. Diskussion av verksamhetsplan och behandling av budget för det kommande verksamhets-/räkenskapsåret.
12. Val av ordförande i förbundet för en tid av ett år
13. Val av övriga styrelseledamöter
14. Val av revisor samt revisorssuppleant.
15. Val av suppleanter
16. Val av valberedning
17. Behandling av styrelsens förslag och i rätt tid inkomna motioner.
18. Övriga frågor

Välkomna!
Styrelsen

Boktips!

25 May 2018
|0 Comment

För ett par veckor sedan gav Cambridge University Press ut en bok med ett unikt jämförande perspektiv:
“Crossroads: Comparative Immigration Regimes in a World of Demographic Change“.

Boken jämför migrationssystem i 30 länder och identifierar såväl likheter som skillnader. Analyserna utgår huvudsakligen från demografisk data. Huvudargumentet är att migrationssystemen rör sig i riktning mot en marknadsmodel; “the Market Model”, vilket innebär en tendens där länderna efterfrågar korttidsarbetskraft (i praktiken gästarbetar-format) och parallellt stramar åt tillgången till permanent vistelse och medborgarskap.

Läs mer om boken här.

Boken har också en egen hemsida där det finns en del interaktiva kartor.

Författare är Anna K. Boucher som lektor i förvaltningspolitik och statsvetenskap vid University of Sydney och Justin Gest är biträdande professor i förvaltningspolitik vid George Mason University.
Utöver att ha beviljats flera stora forskningsanslag inom migrationsfältet har Boucher också lång erfarenhet av migrationsrelaterade utredningar bakom sig. Hon kommenterar därtill ofta förändringar i Australiens flyktingpolitik medialt.
Gest har tidigare skrivit böckerna “The New Minority: White Working Class Politics in an Age of Immigration and Inequality (2016)” och “Apart: Alienated and Engaged Muslims in the West (2010).”

Tips! Child Rights Governance: exploring and comparing the governance of children’s rights in national, regional and local contexts

04 May 2018
|0 Comment

Three decades after the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child the convention has influenced a wide range of political and social practices as well as knowledge production on children and childhood. Children’s rights have become an instrument, not only to protect and emancipate children, but also to govern, regulate and control children and define appropriate types of childhoods.

In this workshop, we will take a critical view of how children’s rights, and the principles and institutions associated with the idea of children’s rights, through different historical legacies and contemporary political challenges increasingly have become part of the mechanisms, systems and instruments of what we would like to call Child Rights Governance.

The workshop brings together scholars from different disciplines and is part of an effort to advance the discussion about child rights governance. The focus of the workshop is to explore and compare the significance of different national, regional and local regimes (e.g. institutions, legislature, power-distribution, capacity of government, level of democracy/autocracy (Tilly and Tarrow 2015), party politics and historical events for how child rights governance is articulated and developed, with examples from Sweden, Norway, UK, and Turkey. The workshop will mix shorter presentations with ample time for discussion.
Venue: Linköping University, Child Studies in room TEMCAS
Date and time: June 4th 10-17

Confirmed speakers are: Denize Arzug Linköping University, Pernilla Leviner Stockholm University, Mons Oppedal Oslo Metropolitan, University, Laura Goodfellow University of Manchester, Linde Lindkvist, Uppsala University, Bengt Sandin Linköping University, Jonathan Josefsson Linköping University.

If you would like to participate in the workshop please email eva.danielsson@liu.se before May 22nd. The number of places at the workshop is limited. Workshop language is English. A more detailed program will be announced at a later point. For queries regarding the workshop please contact jonathan.josefsson@liu.se.

Kind regards,
Denize Arzug, Bengt Sandin and Jonathan Josefsson

With generous financial support from The Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies and Society for the History of Children and Youth (SHCY).

Jonathan Josefsson
PhD, Lecturer, Director undergraduate education
Department of Thematic Studies – Child Studies, Tema Barn
Linköping University
Tfn: 013-28 29 37
E-post: jonathan.josefsson@liu.se

Ett vittnesseminarium om Påskuppropet och Flyktingamnesti 2005

08 Feb 2018
|0 Comment

Förvaltningsakademin inbjuder till öppet seminarium
Civilsamhället och asylpolitiken
Ett vittnesseminarium om Påskuppropet och Flyktingamnesti 2005

Under de första åren på 2000-talet fördes i Sverige en engagerad debatt om flyktingpolitik, och kritik riktades mot hur asylbeslut fattades i det svenska asylsystemet. Kritiken mynnade ut i att riksdagen beslutade att migrationsdomstolarna skulle ta över Utlänningsnämndens uppdrag som överprövningsinstans i migrationsärenden från och med april 2006. I samband med detta beslut restes krav på att människor som fått avslag på sin asylansökan skulle få en ny prövning i det nya systemet. Kravet initierades och drevs av civilsamhället som organiserade sig i kampanjerna Påskuppropet och Flyktingamnesti 2005. Kampanjerna byggde bland annat på namninsamlingar, demonstrationer och debattinlägg. Under hösten 2005 beslutade politikerna om en modifierad version av amnestikravet. Detta ledde till att ca 17 000 personer som förut nekats asyl fick uppehållstillstånd.

I detta vittnesseminarium frågar vi de som var aktiva i dessa kampanjer hur de arbetade för att påverka politiken och den offentliga förvaltningen. Hur organiserades arbetet? Vilka strategier var framgångsrika? Vilka utmaningar uppstod? På vilket sätt riktades påverkansarbetet mot offentlig förvaltning och politiker? Vad bidrog till amnestikravens genomslagskraft?

Vi undrar också vilka skillnader och likheter det finns i hur dagens civilsamhälle bedriver sitt arbete jämfört med dessa kampanjer? Och på vilka sätt liknar och skiljer sig dagens flyktingsituation från 2000-talets?

Paneldeltagare

· Cecilia Arcini – kurator, tidigare diakon i Hammarkullekyrkan/Angereds församling och aktiv i Flyktingamnesti 2005
· Tove Karnerud – Asylgruppen i Malmö och aktiv i Flyktingamnesti 2005
· Lennart Molin – Sveriges kristna råd och aktiv i Påskuppropet
· David Qviström – författare, föreläsare och journalist, tidigare verksam vid Kyrkans tidning
· Masoud Vatankhah – Ingen Människa är Illegal och aktiv i Flyktingamnesti 2005
· Michael Williams – Flyktinggruppernas riksråd, Svenska kyrkan, Sveriges kristna råd och aktiv i Påskuppropet och Flyktingamnesti 2005

Moderatorer för seminariet är Livia Johannesson och Noomi Weinryb, migrations- respektive civilsamhällesforskare verksamma vid Förvaltningsakademin på Södertörns högskola och Statsvetenskapliga institutionen på Stockholms universitet.

När och var
Dag: 22 mars 2018
Tid: kl. 13.00 – 16.00
Lokal: MA624 (plan 6 i Moas båge), Södertörns högskola

Anmäl dig gärna: forvaltningsakademin@sh.se

Välkommen!

Vittnesseminarium – en metod för fält- och källskapande
Grundtanken med vittnesseminarier (efter modell från Samtidshistoriska institutet, Södertörns högskola) är att föra samman centrala aktörer från en viss tid och att låta dem minnas och berätta det som de själva var en del av i dialog med forskare. Syftet är att visa på nya fält och frågor samt att skapa källor för forskningen.

Förvaltningsakademin
Förvaltningsakademin är en mångvetenskaplig centrumbildning vid Södertörns högskola som bedriver uppdragsutbildning och forskar om statsförvaltning samt verkar för kvalificerade möten mellan forskning och praktik.

Tips! Call for Papers: Border Policing in and through the Social Service Sector: Perspectives from the Nordic Welfare States

05 Jan 2018
|0 Comment
Call for Papers: Border Policing in and through the Social Service Sector: Perspectives from the Nordic Welfare States
Research Symposium
Malmö University, 15th of May, 2018
Keynote Speaker: Vanessa Barker, Stockholm University
Organisers: Erica Righard, Maria Persdotter & Jacob Lind
For this symposium, we are interested in analysing the nexus of border policing and social service provision in the Nordic welfare states. This is a topical issue. Following the 2015 ‘summer of migration’, several of the Nordic states introduced new measures to deter immigration, further restricting the rights of asylum-seekers and escalating the policing of irregular migrants (Crouch, 2015). This seems to have precipitated a process of ‘NGOisation’ with non-governmental organisations stepping in to provide some of the social services that used to be guaranteed by state authorities. Meanwhile, a number of recent incidents suggest that the social service sector, including but not limited to NGOs, has become an increasingly important site for border policing. Social service providers, both public and private, have become targets for, and sometimes active participants in, attempts to monitor and police asylum-seekers and other migrants with some organisations collaborating with the migration authorities to aid in the return of irregular migrants. Examples range from a decision of the Swedish Border Police to raid a summer camp for irregular migrant families organised by the Church of Sweden, via requirements placed on municipal social services to provide the Border Police with the home addresses of irregular migrants, to the active collaboration between the migration authorities and NGOs to motivate migrant street children to ‘voluntarily’ return to their countries of origin.
This symposium is an attempt to open up a discussion on the complex relationship between border policing and social service provision. We enter into these debates informed by recent and emerging critical work within the fields of geography, migration-, welfare- and social work studies that call into question incremental and everyday forms of migration management. Scholarship on the internalisation of immigration enforcement and the constitution of ‘polymorphic borders’ (Burridge et al., 2017), for example, describe how state power is reconfigured and respatialised to effect indirect – but often intended – forms of control. We suggest, however, that border policing in and through the social service sector constitutes a particular form of internal border policing that needs to be considered in its own right. Vanessa Barker’s (2018) work on the rise of penal nationalism within the Nordic welfare states in response to mass mobility is instructive in this regard: the book makes a compelling case that this response can only be understood by considering the internal logic of the Nordic welfare states. In a similar vein, scholarship on the relationship between humanitarian care and control explores how humanitarian government has become a politics of precarity, brought into operation in order to manage populations (Fassin, 2012).
We hope that the focus on the Nordic countries will help foster debate among practitioners, policymakers and the broder public. As migration policy tends to travel quickly we also believe that comparisons between the Nordic countries could be productive: comparisons across states might reveal tendencies and trends in politics and policies that go beyond each respective state. Are we perhaps seeing how the ‘hostile environment’-policies promoted by the Theresa May government in the UK (Price, 2014) are spreading to other countries in Europe? And if so, what are the implications for migrants, and for citizens? So far, there is little to no existing research that explores these questions in the context of the Nordic welfare states.
We invite scholars as well as those engaged in related research and activism to submit abstracts. Potential themes may involve, but need not be limited to the following:
  • Mapping the complex relationship(s) between border policing and social service provision. How precisely are these relationships configured, what actors are involved and what roles do they play? This might involve analysing ‘firewalls’ (ECRI, 2016) between social service providers and the border police, and problematizing the notion of ‘collaboration’ between state actors and NGOs.
  • Exploring the underlying – and perhaps conflicting – rationalities at play in the policing of migrants in and through the social service sector. This might also involve exploring the ethical and political questions and challenges that emerge at the nexus of policing and social service provision.
  • Understanding the, potential or real, short and long terms effects for variously categorized residents in the Nordic countries and beyond (irregular as well as regular migrants, non-citizens as well as citizens) and their access to social rights.
  • Contextualising and historicising current developments in relation to a longer history of exclusionary and disciplinary social service provision.
About the Keynote Speaker:
Vanessa Barker is Associate Professor of Sociology at Stockholm University and Associate Director of the research group Border Criminologies at the University of Oxford. Barker’s research focuses on questions of democracy and penal order, the welfare state and border control, the criminalization and penalization of migrants, and the role of civil society in penal reform. Her new book Nordic Nationalism and Penal Order: Walling the Welfare State examines the border closing in Sweden during the height of the refugee crisis and the rise of penal nationalism in response to mass mobility. For more information see: www.su.se/profiles/vbark-1.187477
The symposium:
The symposium will take place on Tuesday the 15th of May at Malmö University. The day will include a public keynote speech by Vanessa Barker and a number of workshop-sessions where participants who have been invited will present their ideas for papers. The aim of the symposium is that it will result in a Special Issue in a migration studies journal.
Submission and funding:
Please send abstracts of maximum 250 words and a brief academic bionote to Maria Persdotter (maria.persdotter@mah.se) and Jacob Lind (jacob.lind@mah.se) no later than Jan 30th (accepted formats: doc, docx, pdf). Notifications of accepted paper presentations will be sent out by mid-February. We encourage participants to submit their draft papers by May 4th.
Accommodation (2 nights) and food for accepted participants presenting at the symposium will be paid for through funding from the MUSA-network at Malmö University (www.mah.se/musa).For any inquiries about the symposium, please contact Maria and Jacob.
Note: a related follow-up workshop is planned to take place at the NMR-conference (Aug 15th-17th in Norrköping) and we welcome participants at the symposium to submit their abstract to our workshop there as well (submission deadline is Feb 4th) For information about how to submit abstracts, costs, and other information about the conference, please see: https://liu.se/forskning/19th-nordic-migration-conference-2018.
References:
Barker, V. (2018). Nordic nationalism and penal order: walling the welfare state. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge.
Burridge, A., Gill, N., Kocher, A., & Martin, L. (2017). Polymorphic borders. Territory, Politics, Governance, 5(3), 239–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/21622671.2017.1297253
Crouch. D. (2015). Sweden slams shut its open-door policy towards refugees. The Guardian. Retrieved 19/05/17. https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2015/nov/24/sweden-asylum-seekers- refugees-policy-reversal
ECRI. (2016). General Policy Recommendation no. 16, On Safeguarding Irregularly Present Migrants From Discrimination. European Commission against Racism and Intolerance.
Fassin, D. (2012). Humanitarian reason: a moral history of the present. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Price, J. (2014). The Hostile Environment. Retrieved 7/11/17 from http://compasanthology.co.uk/hostile-environment

 

In search of the political by Professor Bridget Anderson

10 Dec 2017
|0 Comment

This text was written by Professor Bridget Anderson, University of Bristol and presented as a keynote presentation at the IMER-seminar 2017 on the theme Identifying the Political: Migration, racism and class society held on 24th of November 2017 in Örebro.The IMER-association is proud to present Professor Andersons presentation in text here:

In search of the political by Professor Bridget Anderson

 

Mobility, xenophobia and racism have a long history of dividing labour and dividing differently excluded and marginalised populations. Today this is given a particular formulation as ‘migration’. The story is one of unparalleled movement and huge demographic change driven by international and in the Global South, by rural-urban migration. In the Global North this is often presented as a direct threat to sovereignty and security. In Europe migration is seen to pose a ‘tragedy of commons’ for national welfare states as well as scarce city resources of housing, transport and water. This longstanding anxiety has become a key policy concern with austerity cuts undermining support for free movement for EU citizens. It reached fever pitch with the ‘EU migrant/refugee crisis’ in the summer of 2015[1] when the UNHCR estimates that more than one million people entered Europe by sea in 2015 and at least 3,700 drowned. The vast majority of entrants were from the world’s top ten refugee producing countries including Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan (Holland 2015).

For over twenty years the outsourcing of migration controls has meant that European publics have been protected from the practical reality of forced displacement and economic desperation that is now showing up on holiday beaches. Agreements with source and transit countries, readmission agreements, the creation of migration management policies and facilities in countries of origin have kept the consequences of war and global inequalities out of sight. In recent years they have become more visible, polarising public opinion. The election of Donald Trump as US President, the Brexit victory in the UK’s 2016 referendum on EU membership, the rise of anti-Muslim, anti-immigration populism across many EU states, seem to confirm migration as a significant fracture dividing societies. We have all seen the marches, the fire bombings as well as the low-level abuse that undermines and isolates, conveying the message, we don’t want your type here.

Anxiety about migration has effectively been mainstreamed, mobilised by the right and the far right and a recurrent problem for progressive politics. ‘Migrants’ have been set against, not just citizens but ‘the real people’. Those who demonstrate solidarity with migrants are not ‘real people’. This is a very effective way of silencing any critique of anti-immigrant xenophobia. What do you know about life – you are not the real people. There is a claiming of a particular kind of national authenticity which claims to speak on behalf of an oppressed white working class that has been silenced by too much tolerance of immigration.

Migration is unavoidably political: who is in the community, who belongs, what are their duties and responsibilities, what values do we promote and what binds us together now and across the generations? These are all fundamentally political questions that underpin contemporary responses to migration. Yet one of the responses to take the sting out of migration has been an attempt to depoliticise it: ‘Don’t worry, not many will come’ or ‘Migrants are good for the economy’. These attempts to make migration not disruptive are increasingly difficult to sustain and do not challenge the underlying bottom line that ‘we’ are frightened about too many of the wrong kind of people. But how do we repoliticise migration – or perhaps better, mobility – and make it into the right kind of problem? That is, not a problem of foreigners coming to take jobs, houses and children?

I’m going to begin by considering three of the ways in which migration is depoliticised: de-contextualisation, technocracy, and humanitarian borders. I’m then going to consider how migration can be re-politicised that takes us beyond the ‘anti-migrant’ ‘pro-migration’ dichotomy. I will consider how citizens are affected by immigration controls, how citizens’ mobilities and temporalities are also governed, and that we need to find ways to challenge the constructed difference between the migrant and the citizen in part by unsettling the citizen.

De-politicising migration

One of the challenges of being a scholar of mobility, citizenship and migration is that whenever the ‘migration’ bit is on the news my heart sinks. Most academics feel excited when their topic is covered in the press, but my response is increasingly – why do they keep talking about ‘migration’? This is not because I don’t care about migration – obviously! –  but because it is never put in context. Movement has been a future of human existence from the earliest times else we would still be living in East Africa. Human movement is only contingently constituted as ‘migration’ and the term ‘migrant’ is not an innocent descriptive. British people who move for employment or retirement tend to label themselves ‘expats’ rather than ‘migrants’ (Knowles & Harper, 2009). The European Commission also rejects the term when it is applied to EU citizens. Yet at the same time it is  not considered remarkable to refer to racialised groups as second or third generation ‘migrants’ even though they have never in their life crossed an international border. Who sheds and who retains their migrancy is bound up with nationally specific ways of encoding and remaking of race. Who counts as a migrant is framed by assumptions about race, gender, class and nationality. ‘Migrant’ is a term that is used of those whose mobility, or whose presence, is regarded as inherently problematic. That is, what is invoked when we use the term migrant is a political figure.

The scale and shape of human movement today is very much a consequence of historical and contemporary relations. The representation of migration typically disavows these global connections, seeing only foreigners in search of the good life and jobs, and more particularly seeing too many people chasing too few resources. ‘We are here because you were there’ asserted Sivanandan a propos of post-war migration to the UK from former colonised states, but one might equally say it of the movement to Europe by Syrians, Iraqis and Afghanis. And it is not simply a response to foreign policy. To paraphrase Sivanandan: ‘Migrants are here because global capital is everywhere’.

European and North American standards of living – our standards of living –  continue to be dependent on the resource exploitation and cheap labour that marks so many areas of the world and that is deeply embedded in our history. John Smith argues that goods are affordable for impoverished workers (and non-workers) in what he calls the ‘Global North’ because of a system of resource extraction, outsourcing and arms-length super exploitation in the Global South. However one views the bifurcation of North and South, we are living at a time of the highest level of global inequality in human history, when on some counts 67 people are as wealthy as the world’s 3.5 billion poorest people (Oxfam, 2014) and the poorest 50% of the world have 6.6% of total global income. According to the Global Rich List, a website on global income inequalities, an income of around US$32,400 or just over 275,000 Swedish kroner is enough to put a person in the top 1% of global income earners (http://www.globalrichlist.com/). In 2011 the World Bank estimated that three quarters of inequality could be attributed to between country differences (Milanovic, 2011). One might quibble about the methodology of these estimates, but the fact remains that today for most people in the world, what is key to life chances is where one lives.

But let’s be frank $32,400 is not a lot of money. In this context, it is scarcely surprising that there is anxiety about migration in wealthier states. Debates about migration are caught up in anxieties about safety nets and austerity, as the migrant or the refugee is set up as a competitor with the citizen for privileges of membership, whether these are for jobs, education, housing or health care. This is horribly illustrated in the responses to the deaths at the borders of Europe. The tourists sharing beaches with exhausted refugees, complaining they can’t eat in restaurants because of the hungry people outside, are an example of the ways in which we are being confronted with global inequalities in new ways, and it is these inequalities and their histories that from an important part of the context for some migration.

Related to the decontextualisation of migration is its technocratisation: migration becomes a problem that can be solved by experts. A certain amount of migration, the public is reassured, is good for us. We need it to address demographic imbalances and structural labour shortages. We just need to calculate the right numbers and then explain to people why this maximises efficiency and productivity. The hostility to immigration is a problem of ignorance of facts. The public is responding emotionally rather than reasonably. The UK government has very much majored in this approach, setting an arbitrary number – under 100,000 – as a target for ‘net migration’ and establishing a Migration Advisory Committee which advises the government on how to address employers’ demands for migrant labour. Depoliticization through technocratisation can backfire. One reason for it backfiring is the measurability of failure: UK has consistently failed to reach the net migration target, and only 0.26% of migrant inflow falls under the remit of the Migration Advisory committee. But it also feeds into a populist antipathy to ‘we know what’s best for you’ which could indeed be read as a suspicion of depoliticization. In the Brexit referendum one of the key claims was ‘The British people are sick of experts’ – experts on the economy, experts on Europe and, above all, experts on immigration.

The third mechanism of depoliticization is the humanitarian border, immigration enforcement as being at the service of migrants. Rather than taking the economic migrant, the agent and actor, as its starting point, this starts with the migrant as victim, and often as acted upon. In 2015 this was mobilised in claims about the vulnerability of migrants to modern slavery, turning the border into a site of humanitarian intervention, with immigration enforcement a means of protecting migrants’ human rights. Italian Prime Minister Renzi called for migrants to be saved from the ‘slave drivers of the 21st century’ (Reuters, 22nd April 2015) and FRONTEX, the European agency charged with co-ordinating the management of the EU’s external borders, railed against ‘latter day slave merchants’ (Frontex 2014). At one stage some EU governments were even proposing to use force and bomb boats to prevent them from leaving Libya, saving people from the ‘slave trade’ but confining them to Libya, riven by warring factions, corruption, violence, and racist hostility and violence. Northern League leader Matteo Salvini put it this way on his facebook page: ‘Help them, rescue them and take care of them, but don’t let them land here’ (Agence France Presse 2015). The European Commission, the Parliament, EU member states, the media, religious groups, trades unions, right and left alike all abhor slavery and want to stop the appalling suffering it generates. Yet while the images of slavery may be startlingly similar to those used by anti-slave trade activists of the 17th and 18th centuries, the experiences and contexts of the people involved are quite different. These boats may be crammed and overcrowded, but the people have not been kidnapped from their homes. They have often paid thousands of euros to escape war and violence in Syria, Afghanistan and Eritrea, or they have undertaken dangerous journeys from Niger and Senegal in search of more opportunities and more sustainable lives. They want to move. And the movement across the Mediterranean today is, in contrast to the 18th century transatlantic slave ships, an illegalised movement. The mobility of transatlantic slaves was an involuntary but legal movement, while the mobility of people across the borders of the European Union is a voluntary but illegalised movement. The role of the state and the law is quite different in each case. To not acknowledge this is to depoliticise past and present both.

Repoliticising migration

So how can we re-politicise migration, take the challenge of mobility seriously, without making ‘migrants’ into a problem? This goes to the heart of activism and of critical, politically engaged academic work. It is an issue that social theorists have long grappled with: how to both work with, and challenge socially constructed categories? The identification of a population and investigation of its associated problems draws even those researchers who strive for analytical objectivity into participation in politics and governance. Bacchi (2009) has argued that social policies do not simply respond to an already existing problem, but are often critical to the production of the phenomenon as a ‘problem’ in the first place and one could make a similar argument for social research. Thus researchers and activists find themselves implicated in the construction of categories that are themselves the cause of many difficulties for their research subjects.

Yet activists in particular may find themselves cast as part of the problem – as encouraging movement and as therefore endangering migrants. One of the distinguishing features of citizenship as a legal status is supposed to be that citizens are NOT subject to immigration controls. But while it is the case that citizens cannot be deported they can find themselves criminalized through anti-immigration measures, with the rise in what the Institute for Race Relations has called, ‘crimes of solidarity’. Sea rescue, giving lifts to people within as well as across borders, provision of food and water and medical care, are all becoming offences. Across Europe criminal laws designed to target organised crime and profiteers are applied to fit an anti-refugee agenda. Those who assist people who cross borders are being accused of smuggling, trafficking, and even being ‘slave-traders’. This also serves to legitimise far right harassment of those supporting people in difficult situations.

In fact, in many states the criminalisation of citizens via immigration laws has been the case for some time as the responsibility for immigration enforcement has been rolled out to a whole range of different non-immigration actors: in the UK not only employers but drivers, landlords, registrars, public service providers, even academic lecturers, are required to check that people are complying with immigration requirements. If they fail to do so they can be fined and in some cases even found guilty of a criminal offence. This everyday bordering is pernicious not only because citizens find themselves criminalised by enforcement, but also because it contributes to creating intensely nationalised subjectivities. Strong enforcement not only reminds those migrants who are not deported that they are deportable, it also reminds those citizens who enforce, or who are subject to enforcement, that they are not deportable. Everyday bordering does not only cause fear in migrant communities, it serves to tell citizens that citizenship has a value.

The effect of this normalisation of immigration enforcement is to reify citizenship and seemingly stabilise the privileges of formal citizenship status. It presents a fantasy citizenship of full social inclusion. The current obsession with immigration as a problem turns attention well away from the gendered, classed and racialized borders within formal citizenship, depicting all citizens as fully and equally included. Yet immigration enforcement is one of the mechanisms that helps to create differentiated citizenship, by bearing down disproportionately not only on minority ethnic citizens, but also on those who don’t have money. Consider the income demands that are now standard across most EU member states that require citizens to have minimum earnings before being able to be joined by third country national partners and by their children. In the UK nearly two thirds of British women in employment do not earn enough to be joined by a third country national partner, let alone children. A right to family life that has been denied low waged or unemployed citizens.

Re-politicisation requires re-contextualisaton and the recovery of relationalities and interdependence. This is of course about better appreciating the relations and forces that drive many people’s mobility to Europe, recognising that while migration is seen as a problem from the point of view of European institutions and member states, for the  people who move migration is the solution or at least a response to colonial histories and post-colonial presents that structure civil war, violence, and economic systems that in turn render the lives of many people in the world unsustainable and impoverished. While this is played out at the border, to see this complex interaction of pasts, presents and futures as a problem of migration is impossibly limiting. Uncovering these deep economic and historical systems of connections between groups and individuals who seem unrelated is vitally important.

But perhaps too we could turn our attention away from ‘the migrant’ and towards ‘the citizen’ and the promises of fantasy citizenship. Citizenship is a legal status associated with rights but also a social status associated with honour. It seems to me that some of the claims against migrants, and the sense of injustice that are levelled against the so-called elites are indeed about honour, about recognition, and the location of honour in the nation and for some, also in whiteness.  Whiteness is not stable or homogenous and it becomes visible under certain conditions and for certain groups – I don’t know about in Sweden, but in the UK we talk a lot about the political issues raised by the ‘white working class’, but very rarely about the issues of the ‘white middle class’ – who in fact are far less likely to marry outside their ethnic group than are working class people. In the hierarchy of whiteness Roma, gypsies and EU nationals from poorer countries are considered ‘white’ yet still may be classed as undesirable ‘migrants’ and subjected to discriminatory labour conditions and racialized violence –  as we have seen in the UK post-Brexit. In repoliticising migration then we must be attentive to class and think carefully about the relation between immigration, race, nationality and class, how they reinforce each other and are contested in the current conjuncture and how, in practice, this complicates the migrant/citizen binary.

One way of connecting the exclusions from formal citizenship and the exclusions within formal citizenship and the relation between citizenship and honour is to make visible the worker citizen. Europe has a long history of attributing a strong moral value to labour from all sides of the political spectrum. Not working is associated with not having a purpose, not making a contribution, in short it is deeply dishonouring. The unemployed are often considered not mobile enough. Stuck in housing estates or rural areas, not prepared to get on their bike they must be prodded off their sofas and into employment. However, at the same time, if they move for work they are likely to find their access to welfare benefits restricted. Across Europe access to certain benefits requires a period of local residence: even before the introduction of welfare states, in many European states poor relief was limited to parish residents and the poor were liable to be ‘moved on’ if there was any suggestion that they might become unemployed, stay long enough to make a claim on the parish, or have a baby that would be born in the parish and therefore the parish’s responsibility. Today, in a move that is highly reminiscent of old poor laws, access to the welfare state has replaced the levers of immigration controls in efforts to control the mobility of certain EU citizens. To deter non-earning people who do not have the resources to support themselves, complex restrictions on access to certain non-contributory benefits are imposed. Importantly returning nationals are not exempt from these restrictions – they may be legal citizens but they are no longer local residents.

But it is not only those citizens who cross an international border who are turned into migrants. In some areas of the UK citizens who cross a local authority boundary and claim social housing are also referred to as ‘migrants’. They are subject to the kinds of complaints we are accustomed to hear levelled against international migrants: taking housing away from locals, just coming for our generous benefits, bringing crime etc. This can be resolved through a period of residence often combined with ‘good behaviour’ – volunteering, going to the gym, even spotting smoking. That is, these dishonoured citizens are effectively turned into migrants and must find a means of recovering their status in ways that parallel the requirements put on naturalising migrants.

Furthermore, while a citizen may have a right to be present on the territory that does not give them the right to be in any public space. Citizens who are homeless or who beg can be prohibited access to certain spaces or moved on. In Croatia people who are apprehended for begging may be expelled from the area for up to six months. In the UK people can be ejected from certain specified areas if they break local rules (walking with too many dogs, in the centre of Oxford for example, drinking in public, sleeping in doorways etc). In Barcelona, begging by citizens can be prosecuted as obstructing the “peaceful free movement” of citizens. To allow some citizens their rights of free movement, others are immobilised. Anti-begging legislation and homelessness concerns are being used across Europe to control the mobility of unwanted populations, including but not limited to migrants (Fekete, 2014). Rough sleeping can result in removal either out of the area or out of the country, depending on whether one is an internal or international migrant.

Thus in the EU, citizens, both national and EU too are subject to mobility regimes. While mobility of the unemployed for purposes of work is encouraged and at times even demanded, mobility is frowned on for the purposes of accessing the welfare state, and this includes mobility within a state as well as across its borders. Seeing past the figure of the migrant does not mean discounting mobility but rather considering migration as one of the multiple ways in which people’s movement has been guided and constrained over the centuries and has materialized within sets of material, racial, geographic, and gendered conditions in a way that, as Hagar Kotef notes, allowed some subjects to appear as free when moving (and as oppressed when hindered), and others as free when still and oppressed when moving. It helps us see that while immigration controls are fundamentally structured by nationality, a lens of wealth and poverty rather than nationality status alone, can offer new perspectives on mobility regimes.

IF one way of uncovering connections is by examining mobility as well as migration, another way is to think temporally as well as spatially. States govern through time and the intense focus on migration as movement across international borders has tended to mean that the ways in which states exercise control over temporalities has been overlooked. Many political theorists are agreed that migrants accrue rights over time, and that deportation becomes more egregious as one develops connections (Carens, 2013). The ways that states exercise control over time is intrinsic to immigration controls and to the moving of the border inside of territory. States impose temporal limitations on residence through time limited visas, intervening in migratory processes and life stages to cut them into temporal chunks and migrants typically have to reside legally in a state for a set number of years before they can claim certain rights. Bureaucracies may also subject applicants (for asylum, visa renewal, citizenship) to long periods of uncertainty and suspense. Without a time frame or anticipated future to work towards, people can struggle to cope and find it difficult to make progress or invest in themselves.

But it is not only the lives of the mobile that are temporally governed, but also the lives of citizens, and citizens too are experiencing temporal shifts. The idea of an overly powerful present and prolonged youth for people with uncertain futures has been noted by others in non-migration contexts. Craig Jeffries for instance has written powerfully about ‘timepass’ the increasing numbers of people subject to chronic waiting where promised access to social goods, economic resources, settling down in some way, is always coming soon but never quite there. Even in the rich world, as jobs are more precarious, homes more expensive, pensions more fragile, the sense of permanent temporariness and unsettlement is more pervasive. Furthermore, it is not only migrants who are subject to qualifying periods before they can access certain rights. As migration researchers we have explored the different ways in which immigration controls shape migrants’ relation to the labour market, and how temporary visas often push them into to highly precarious work.  Yet more generally, for migrants and citizens alike, qualifying periods structure the standard employment relationship for example, meaning a worker can only make certain kinds of claims on an employer – for maternity leave, unfair dismissal holiday, if they have been employed for a particular period. Despite their apparently marginal status, qualifying periods are a key part of the legal apparatus enabling and encouraging ‘the structural expansion of contingent employment’ (Peck and Theodore, 2012, p.742).

 

Conclusion

The challenge is to draw out the connections between the crises of increasing European poverty and associated popular anger and resentment on the one hand, and immigration controls on the other. Fantasy citizenship further benefits from the affective pull of the nation, from which the state derives legitimacy. In an age of precarity it seems that the nation has an even stronger affective pull, and worker solidarities can be difficult to generate in a gig economy and an era of accelerating inequalities at all scales. Thus the coupling of economic squeeze and immigration is always in danger of being reduced to a simple message: ‘we’ must look after our own first. We must first attend to the housing, benefit and health needs of our population. Sorry chaps. There is not enough to go around. Challenging this logic, that sets up citizens and migrants/foreigners as engaged in an unfortunate but necessary competition for scarce resources should be of critical concern to those advocating progressive politics. Promises of strong control over immigration appeal to the hope of a national labour market and economy, a stable cohesive national society and representative democratic politics. These hopes are eminently understandable, but they will not be attained by exerting ever tighter control over immigration. Indeed, the risk is that the obsession engendered by immigration only increases exploitation in labour markets, destabilises neighbourly relations and caricatures democratic politics.

I have looked at how migration is depoliticised and argued that one way of constructive repoliticisation is by looking at citizenship as well as migration. This is in part because it enables us to unearth shared ways of being governed, through immigration enforcement, through non-migration mobility controls, and through the governance of time.

OF course, recognising that both migrants and citizens are made not born does not mean that we can imagine those differences away. Legal status and social status are bound up with one another, and legal status makes a huge difference to experiences and relations. But people find ways of challenging these distinctions. A few weeks ago I was listening to an activist from The New Sanctuary Coalition in New York. One of the remarks she made in passing was that their group refuses to use the term ‘migrant’, preferring ‘friend’. It was really striking what a difference this made, listening to her talk about ‘friends in detention’ or ‘friends who have been deported’. But it was particularly notable for me because only a few weeks before at an event in Athens a person from Syria had talked very eloquently about how their self-organised group rejects the term ‘refugee’: ‘when they see us they see us as only refugees, not as artists or comedians, or teachers. We are not refugees, we are internationals’. Both were rejecting the terms themselves: refugee and migrant. Migrant as a signifier of problematic mobility, refugee as a signifier of rightless victim. ‘friends’, ‘internationals’…. How about ‘international friends’ (I have to say that this appeals to me because I have often as a thought experiment tried to imagine how states would manage a ‘friend’ visa. Why does this seem so impossibly and delightfully disruptive of immigration systems?

Mobility and international migration are indications of our interdependence, the challenge is how to make these interdependencies not just ‘readable’ but into a good story. Perhaps we can start from the insight that what is bad for migrants is not good for citizens, indeed, it is often bad for citizens as well.

[1] There was some debate about whether this should be called a ‘migrant’ or ‘refugee’ crisis. The terminology of ‘crisis’ might also be challenged, given that mass movement from the region was not unanticipated and is likely to continue into the future.

References:

Carens, J. (2013). The ethics of immigration. Oxford University Press.

Fekete, L. (2014). Europe against the Roma. Race & Class, 55(3), 60-70.

Frontex. (2014). People Smugglers the Latter Day Slave Merchants. http://frontex.europa.eu/feature-stories/people-smugglers-the-latter-day-slave-merchants-UArKn1

Knowles, C., & Harper, D. (2009). Hong Kong: migrant lives, landscapes, and journeys. University of Chicago Press.

Kotef, Hagar (2015) Movement and the ordering of Freedom, On Liberal Governances of Mobility. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Milanovic, B. (2011). Worlds apart: Measuring international and global inequality. Princeton University Press.

Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2012). Politicizing Contingent Work: Countering Neoliberal Labor Market Regulation… from the Bottom Up?. South Atlantic Quarterly, 111(4), 741-761.

 

Thank you

28 Nov 2017
|0 Comment

In behalf of the Swedish IMER-association board I want to thank everyone for presenting and participating in the IMER-seminar in Örebro. I feel hopeful about the future for IMER-research and collaboration when seeing so many interesting research projects and engagement from practitioners in the issue of migration and integration.

Lisa Salmonsson PhD,
Chair of the Swedish IMER-association

Schedule for IMER association seminar 2017 in Örebro

07 Jun 2017
|1 Comment

Identifying the Political: Migration, racism and class society

DATUM: 24 november 2017
Plats: Conventum Konferens Örebro
Olof Palmes Torg 1

Preliminary schedule

9.00 Registration and coffee
10.oo Opening of the seminar by the Chair of the IMER Association, Dr. Lisa Salmonsson, Örebro University
10.15 Keynote speaker PROFESSOR BRIDGET ANDERSON from the University of Bristol
11.30 Lunch
12.15 – 13:45 Three parallel sessions/workshops:

Session 1: Politics of belonging

  • Wernesjö, Ulrika: In the vestibule: Negotiations of deservingness among newly-arrived youth in Sweden
  • León Rosales, René: Skapas vägen där man går? Orten, aktivismen och generationernas påverkan.Sharif,
  • Hassan Sharif: Skolan som socialt och etniskt rum: Exemplet utbildning för nyanlända gymnasieelever.

Session 2: Gender politics and children rights

  • Moberg Stephenson, Maria: Crossing Boundaries to inclusion: Social Work and Young People within a Transnational Space
  • Karlsson, Sandra: Children’s claim to adequate housing – Accompanied asylum-seeking children’s standpoints and experiences while living in an asylum centre
  • Darvishpour, Mehrdad, Månsson, Niclas, Asztalos Morell, Ildikó & Hoppe, Magnus: Nyanlända barns och ungdomars inkludering och jämställdhetsutveckling

Workshop: The deportation gap in Sweden: A position of “neither here nor there”

  • Josefsson, Jonathan: Asylum-seeking children and anti-deportation campaigns: political strategies and mobilisation for the right to stay

The workshop The deportation gap in Sweden: A position of “neither here nor there” is hosted by researchers Anna Lundberg and Jason Tucker from MIM at Malmö University.

13:45 – 14:15 Coffee break
14:15 – 15:45 Three parallel sessions:

Session 3: Borders, asylum and diaspora

  • Wimark, Thomas: Waiting for sexual liberation – Queer asylum seekers in the immigration process
  • Westvall, Maria & Oscar Pripp: Musik, migration och föreningsliv
  • Khayati, Khalid: Stigmatisation of the newly-arrived refugees in Sweden and the diasporic resistance
  • Salmonsson, Lisa: Where do we go from here? Insights from a panel discussion about asylum policy restriction in Sweden

Session 4: Migration and belonging in the Swedish welfare state: Education and work

  • Gruber, Sabine & Gustafsson, Kristina: Ethnically profiled paraprofessional: Social work in the margin of the welfare state
  • Wallinder, Ylva: Imagined independence among Swedish highly skilled labour migrants
  • Räihä, Helge & Von Post, Christina: En pilotstudie om andraspråkslärares värdegrund i Danmark, Norge och Sverige
  • von Brömssen, Kerstin, Kittelman-Flesner, Karin, Korp, Helena, Risenfors, Signild & Sofkova Hashemi, Sylvana: Migrating Newcomers’ in the Swedish Educational System – What’s the Politics in That?

Session 5: Otherisation, securitisation and irregularisation

  • Jovicic, Jelena & Philipson Isaac, Sarah: Constructing the ’foreigner’: Discourses of suspicion embedded in bordering practices
  • Moksnes, Heidi: Irregular migrants and the boundaries of rights
  • Hooi, Mavis & Köppel, Carol: Reproducing the nation by criminalisation? A critical look at the securitisation of migrants
  • Johansson, Joakim & Darvishpour, Mehrdad: What about Muslims? Gender, Ethnicity and Religion in the Political Discourse of the ”No Handshake” Debate in Sweden
15.45 – 16.15 Concluding remarks and closing of the network seminar

 

 


 

1234Next ›Last »

Imerförbundet utgör ett forum där forskare, lärare, studenter och professionellt yrkesverksamma med olika bakgrund och disciplintillhörighet utbyter idéer och erfarenheter inom fältet för internationell migration och etniska relationer.
Det är ett fält som idag omfattar en mångfald områden exempelvis migration, globalisering, genus, sexism, integration, diskriminering och rasism.
Förbundet är till för att skapa mötesplatser och på sätt ge möjlighet till kunskapsutveckling och informationsspridning. För frågor och information kontakta info@imerforbundet.se

Administration

  • Login
  • Webmail
© imerförbundet , webpage by yta & innehåll