Borders are not just lines on a map. They are social, political, and symbolic practices that shape how we live, move, and belong. Whether materialized as fences and checkpoints or enacted through technologies, discourses, and everyday encounters, borders are constantly made and remade. This special section explores how borders emerge through processes of inclusion and exclusion, control, and identity-making, and how they are also resisted, negotiated, and subverted. Drawing on rich empirical material and critical theoretical tools, the contributions of the special section of this issue of CIMR collectively push the field of border and migration studies toward a deeper understanding of bordering as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon.

The paper advances our understanding of care in transnational families by exploring how proximate family members engage in care within two institutional contexts, a school and a hospital. It considers how care processes and outcomes are shaped by the transnational character of families and by the related power dynamics inherent within families and institutions. It does so by studying language and literacy practices that people engage in when they act as language brokers and literacy mediators for family members who are accessing care. Working with two families in the United Kingdom and Sweden, our analysis draws on fieldnotes, interviews with caregivers, and interactional data. We describe the language and literacy practices and interactional events associated with our participants' institutional encounters, relating them to individuals' intersecting positionalities. Analysis demonstrates the ways in which these practices enable them to challenge inequalities inherent in health and educational systems.

Children are often regarded as ‘dependents’ within migration studies, rendering their care work invisible. Drawing on the ethics of care, this paper analyses young people's active roles in caring for family members in Sweden and the UK and for transnational kin, based on qualitative and participatory research with young people (aged 6–25). Many young people provided emotional support, language brokering and practical assistance to navigate care, welfare and immigration systems. Some young people engaged in higher levels of caregiving, often linked to inadequate formal care resources and the absence of a parent or extended kin who would usually be expected to provide care. Caregiving was often accompanied by gendered and inter- and intra-generational conflicts, which could impact on young people's wellbeing and competence to provide ‘good care’. More awareness is needed of young people's crucial roles in filling the gaps in care, welfare and migration regimes in transnational spaces.

Migration splittrar familjer. Det kan leda till att ansvaret för omsorg omfördelas mellan familjemedlemmarna. I många splittrade familjer finns barn och ungdomar som är aktiva och betydelsefulla omsorgsgivare till vuxna, äldre och syskon, både ”här” och ”där”. Dessa unga omsorgsgivare bär ansvaret att fylla luckor i det offentliga välfärdssystemet och att vara en brygga mellan det offentliga och familjen. Samhället behöver skaffa sig mer kunskap om dessa barn och ungdomar och om deras situation, och bekräfta att deras bidrag är viktigt. Det finns ett behov av att utöka stödet till dem, för att säkerställa deras välbefinnande och framtidsutsikter. Vår policy brief ger specifika rekommendationer till yrkesverksamma och beslutsfattare, om hur de unga omsorgsgivares situation kan förbättras.

Research often focuses on individual-level factors shaping refugee labour market participation. Less research has been conducted on the implications of the roles of employers, integration programmes, migrant support organisations and similar. This article contributes to the literature by seeking to understand highly educated refugees’ perceptions of how civic integration programmes shape opportunity structures for their labour market participation. It is particularly concerned with how the programmes’ characteristics of malleability and comprehensiveness inform integration processes. Accordingly, the article analyses identification contestations that transpire within civic integration programmes, as perceived by the participants, and compares how these unfold in three different contexts. A total of 41 semi-structured interviews with highly educated refugees in Oslo, Malmö, and Munich were analysed. The findings suggest that the civic integration programmes were thought to either foster or hinder the participants’ employment pathways depending on whether the participants were perceived as highly educated individuals or reduced to the general category of ‘refugee’. The differences were traced back to each civic integration programme’s capacity to provide malleable integration support, calling attention to the importance of the programmes’ acknowledgment of refugees’ heterogeneous needs and the pitfalls associated with undifferentiated refugee categorisation.

Scholarship on refugee labour market participation regularly alludes to the temporal dimension of the process, yet explicit engagement with it remains limited. I argue that researching the temporalities of refugee employment re-entry is valuable as it discerns the recursive interrelation between social structure and individual agency that advances or curbs the labour market trajectories of refugees. Namely, refugees’ perceptions of time inform their integration pathways. In this article, I interrogate how highly educated refugees perceive the temporalities imposed upon them by the integration framework, their efforts of temporal re-appropriation and the ways in which institutional factors inform these re-appropriation efforts and, thus, individuals’ sense of integration. To this end, I discuss and compare 11 refugee healthcare professionals’ perceptions of licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö based on material from semi-structured interviews. The refugee professionals reported that the licensure appropriated their time through, for instance, prolonged suspension from work and abundance of pointless waiting time. Seeing time as a precious commodity, they deemed the imposed temporalities as problematic, employing different attempts of temporal agency to speed up the licensure process. When comparing the attempts of temporal re-appropriation between the licensure procedures in Oslo and Malmö, I find that the perceived clarity of the licensure requirements and process, accessibility of support structures and existence of tailored qualification programmes lend licensure a quality of institutional plasticity. This fosters individuals’ attempts to accelerate their licensure endeavours, thereby promoting their re-entry into the labour market. However, rather than disrupting the underlying power relations determining the relative value of foreign healthcare qualifications, temporal re-appropriation maintained the established institutional rationale.

This article analyses the relationship between human capital and career outcomes using the case of highly skilled young Latvians and Romanians in Sweden. As a non-English-speaking country with regulated labour markets, the Swedish case provides a contrast to previous studies on EU10 to EU15 mobility that usually focus on English-speaking receiving countries with less regulated labour markets. Thirty-eight semi-structured interviews are analysed from a life-course perspective to map the education and career trajectories before and after their mobility. Three career trajectories are found: match, re-skilling, and de-skilling. Most young migrants tend to prioritize general, rather than country specific, human capital investments, which negatively affects their career outcomes. The results highlight the importance of individual human capital investment choices as well as structural opportunities in receiving countries for understanding the relationship between human capital and career outcomes for young EU-migrants.