Drawing on interviews with young refugees, 20–30 years old, mainly from Syria and Afghanistan, we discuss the effects that temporary residence permits have on their ability to build a life in Sweden. The article includes both unaccompanied and accompanied youth that at some point had been given temporary residence permits. These permits could later be renewed or turned into permanent permits if the youth fulfilled certain tough requirements. Through rich empirical data, we show how these temporal techniques of border control keep young refugees in a state where they fear deportation, which have detrimental effects for their ability to build a life in Sweden. They are not able to plan ahead and they feel forced to work although they would have preferred to study, which puts them out of sync with other young people around them, challenges their sense of agency and increases their vulnerability. Temporary residence permits severely limit the life opportunities of young refugees in Sweden, and thus hamper their ability to achieve the “migrant integration” that is expected of them.

Firewalls are clear divisions between border policing and the provision of basic social rights. They have a dual character: to ensure that no information collected with the purpose of safeguarding basic social rights should be shared for immigration control purposes; and that migrants should not be subject to immigration control when being present at, or in the vicinity, of religious, private and public institutions upholding and providing social rights. This article suggests a normative argument for ‘firewalls’ in the context of social work and develops the concept theoretically as a principle practised and negotiated at different scales.

Following the 2015-peak of asylum-seeking migrants in Europe, asylum-policies have become increasingly restrictive. As bordering has become a prioritized issue among many European national governments, including in the Nordic countries, practices of bordering have also become more decentralised, diffuse and dispersed. This special issue set focus on such bordering practices as these are manifest in the social service sector. It draws on research conducted in Norway and Sweden and consists, besides this introduction, of seven original articles.Of particular focus is how social work, in its regulations and practices, are involved in the bordering of both the nation and the welfare state. Connecting insights from border studies – and related critical research – with social work research, the articles present empirical analyses of the dynamics of bordering practices among varying practitioners and in varying organizations, including legislators, courts, municipalities, street-level social workers and civil society organizations. The special issue as a whole also raises questions about the ethical and political challenges that emerge at the nexus of bordering and social service provision. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the field of border studies and discuss how it relates to social work research. This serves as a conceptual foundation which we hope will enable critical reflections on the relationships between social service provision and bordering practices in Norway, Sweden and beyond.

Firewalls separate rights provision for undocumented migrants from the border policing of migration authorities. In this article, we compare how firewalls have been negotiated during recent years in Sweden and the UK. Firewalls have been partly strengthened in the UK as a result of the ‘Windrush scandal’. Simultaneously, firewalls have been increasingly contested in Sweden after the 2015 ‘long summer of migration’ as a result of continuously more repressive migration policies. On the basis of this detailed comparison, we argue that firewalls are a useful conceptual lens to understand migrant struggles and the development of migration policies. Moreover, we suggest that firewalls can be a useful resource for social service providers using their discretion to resist repressive migration governing at different levels and scales and for organizing political work by and for people at risk of deportation. 

Following the 2015-peak of asylum-seeking migrants in Europe, asylumpolicies have become increasingly restrictive. As bordering has become a prioritized issue among many European national governments, including in the Nordic countries, practices of bordering have also become more decentralised, diffuse and dispersed. This special issue set focus on such bordering practices as these are manifest in the social service sector. It draws on research conducted in Norway and Sweden and consists, besides this introduction, of seven original articles.Of particular focus is how social work, in its regulations and practices, are involved in the bordering of both the nation and the welfare state. Connecting insights from border studies – and related critical research – with social work research, the articles present empirical analyses of the dynamics of bordering practices among varying practitioners and in varying organizations, including legislators, courts, municipalities, street-level social workers and civil society organizations. The special issue as a whole also raises questions about the ethical and political challenges that emerge at the nexus of bordering and social service provision. In this introductory article, we provide an overview of the field of border studies and discuss how it relates to social work research. This serves as a conceptual foundation which we hope will enable critical reflections on the relationships between social service

This is a themed issue about displacements. Or more precisely, about research grounded in narratives of people suffering displacement in its various forms, and their all too visible and yet oftentimes made-invisible demographics. ‘All too visible’ as those individuals or groups stand out either as scapegoats on which to lay blame for urban problems, or as the human fallout of ongoing processes of class struggles and racialised conflicts under neoliberal, neocolonial and neonationalist regimes of spatial encroachment. Yet, their subjectivity, agency and voice are invisibilised in public and political discourse, as well as in academic research, or they are altogether erased through the poor selection of methodologies that fail to capture the discrete statistical categories that can register displacement. Therefore, those afflicted by it become un-researchable. The papers within this themed issue collectively seek to re-center displacement, through investigations and narratives of displaced populations.

Undocumented migrants often experience how their spatial vulnerability continues across their life trajectories through different forms of displacements in the form of forced migration, being at risk of deportation and being victims of gentrification or policies that make it difficult to find a stable housing situation. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Sweden and the UK, the paper shows how weak the position of undocumented migrants is on the housing market through recently established policies in the UK which criminalizes the letting of housing to undocumented migrants and the practice of sharing address information between the social services and the border police in Sweden. This intervention argues that these policies that construct spatial vulnerabilities locally are connected to national and transnational policies of displacement globally and suggest that “displaceability”, the potential of being displaced, is a strategy for governing vulnerable groups at every scale where governing takes place. Consequently, this intervention suggests that displaceability can help us capture the universal, interconnected experience of spatial vulnerability shared by many differently positioned groups in the world who are susceptible to forced mobility or removal.