This article discusses the issue of the right to health care for irregularised migrants in Sweden, from a human rights perspective. An extended right to health care for irregularised migrants came into effect through a legislative amendment in 2013. By exploring the legislative process before the new Act on Health Care to Some Foreigners Who Reside In Sweden Without the Necessary Permits in 2013, we show how the Act uses 'deportability' as a legal category and basis for health care and why this is problematic. Our study reveals a variety of practices that reproduce inconsistencies entrenched in rights-mobilisation for non-citizens: separate legislations for different categories of persons, vague accounts of treaty-obligations, absence of discussions on liability, and shifting the responsibility of extending health care to the local government.

The politics of migration has become increasingly prominent as a site of struggle. However, the active subjecthood of people on the move in precarious situations is often overlooked. Irregular migration struggles raise questions about how to understand the agency of people who are marginalised. What does it mean to engage people produced as ‘irregular’ as active subjects of trans-border politics? And what new research strategies can we employ to this end? The articles presented in this Special Issue of Politics each differently explore how actions by or on behalf of irregular/ised migrants involve processes of subjectivity formation that imply a form of agency. Collectively we explore how irregular migration struggles feature as a site marked by active subjects of trans-border politics. We propose a research agenda based on tracing those processes – both regulatory, activist, and everyday – that negotiate and contest how an individual is positioned as an ‘irregular migrant’. The ethos behind such research is to explore how the most marginalised individuals reclaim or reconfigure subjecthood in ambiguous terms.

The present article elaborates on struggles over the inclusion and exclusion of undocumented children and young people in the Swedish school system. Through conducting an in-depth case study on the issue of access to school in the city of Malmö in Sweden, our analysis demonstrates how the right to education for undocumented migrant children is subject to a process of struggle between divergent discourses on children’s human rights. Internal debates at the city level of governance are identified around, for example, whether the police could be denied access to schools or if contradictory messages from various authorities might lead to a legitimacy problem. Other questions are the registration of grades when the children concerned are reluctant to be put into a register due to the risks involved; and if fictitious names could be used on class lists that police officers can request. As the article shows, these local struggles are an expression of tensions between different levels of governance that are also affected by the migration control regime, as regards rights for children who are residing irregularly. In that respect, there is a struggle over the appropriate legalistic discourse – as in, to which level should it make reference. However, actors contesting a restrictive interpretation of the right to education also make substantial use of, what we call here, an ‘experiential’ discourse – that is, drawing upon the everyday experiences and feelings of those whose rights are in question. Struggles at the local governance level also have relevance for exploring substantial parts of the broader political context in which the human rights of undocumented migrants are (de)contested.

Through an analysis of 100 asylum decisions and 10 interviews with 20 asylum officers at the Swedish Migration Agency this article reveals two intricate processes through which children’s rights are displaced in the Swedish asylum process; by overlooking children’s individual claims for asylum through a circle of neglect, and negating children’s best interests. The article demonstrates how the balancing act between migration control on one hand and children’s rights on the other hand plays out in the asylum process, which results in a double displacement; the children are not adult enough to be addressed as asylum seekers and not children enough to deserve qualification as bearer of children’s rights. An in-depth analysis of everyday practices at institutions applying children’s rights is essential both to understand the reproduction of discrepancies between rights on paper and rights in practice, and to explore the potential of rights to disrupt oppressive vehicles of power.

This article analyses sanctuary initiatives intended to change the situation of ‘irregularised residents’. Through fieldwork, three main activities are identified: assistance for welfare services, alternatives to inaccessible services, and inventing new ways of organising togetherness in the city. The role of activists in the initiatives links to discussions within Critical Human Rights literature, which emphasise the anti-institutionalist origins of rights. Yet, a complex interplay also plays out through co-current resistance against the state’s migration policing and collaboration with city-level state agencies. Understanding this complex process is important to improving knowledge of both the politics of sanctuary and human rights.

Regeringen föreslår nio åtgärder för att hitta och utvisa papperslösa. Det kommer att slå hårt och främst gå ut över redan svaga och jagade människor. Vi uppmanar därför regeringen att ta tillbaka åtgärderna, skriver 43 forskare.

The article analyses the social constructions of rights as they come about through Swedish delegations preparing refugees for resettlement in Sweden, under the Cultural Orientation Programme (COP). COPs are analysed as an activity that manifests a need to convey rights. Fieldwork was conducted through video observations of COPs in Kenya and Sudan. Our empirical findings show how the Swedish officials engage in talks about rights through positioning the refugees as unaware of, and incapable of, claiming rights. Rights are also highlighted as obligations with correct ways of realising them. This study manifests the clash between rights as universal and rights tied to citizenship where, during COPs, rights are conveyed as particularly Swedish, positioning the refugees on a receiving end of the conversations. However, the study also shows how the participants do make claims, sometimes resisting the hierarchies during the talks.