Children’s rights are a blessing and a curse for undocumented migrant children. They are one of few available resources in migrant struggles, but at the same time they are also extensively mobilized to govern children’s mobility. In this article, I first analyze the limitations of children’s rights as rooted in understandings of children as ‘innocent’ human ‘becomings’ and the colonial legacy and paradoxical character of rights. I then connect this discussion to a postcolonial analysis of who counts as ‘human’ enough for human rights. Building on these reflections, I construct a framework for how these limitations can be approached and utilized through perpetual and antagonistic struggles to give children’s rights renewed political meaning, always focusing on the rights of all children—an approach I call ‘child-righting’. I apply this concept to concrete examples from Sweden and the USA to identify strategies and tactics that have been utilized to both limit and extend the rights of undocumented migrant children. Through these discussions, I aim to contribute with a deepened understanding of the ambivalent role of children’s rights. I sketch an outline for a framework that can ensure that children’s rights are effectively utilized in contemporary struggles by and for undocumented migrant children—and potentially marginalized groups of children overall.

This article examines how local stakeholders in Scania, the southernmost county of Sweden, talk about integration. Drawing on 28 qualitative interviews, we use the theoretical concept of interpretative repertoires to analyze perceptions and conceptualizations among those who work closely with migrant integration. We identify two interpretative repertoires that stakeholders draw upon to make sense of the concept on the ground: the separation and de-migranticization repertoires. The repertoires display a shared understanding among the stakeholders of integration as a failure, although they do not agree on the extent or cause of the perceived failures of integration, or even how the problems should be defined or tackled locally. Within the separation repertoire, integration is failing in terms of processes where primarily migrants are seen as accountable and responsible for their (in)ability to adapt to the Swedish society. Within the de-migranticization repertoire, integration is differently perceived as something that is plagued with misdirected or even false boundaries between groups (in this case “migrants” and “non-migrants”), and authorities are held accountable for problems beyond migrants and migration, such as inequality, racism, and discrimination. The findings reflect the contested field of integration on the ground and contribute to ongoing critical debates on the concept of integration within migration research, by providing snapshots from a bottom-up perspective of local stakeholders’ acceptance of, or resistance to, present-day integration discourses. 

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.

In this thesis, I investigate the paradoxical characteristics of political struggles that take place in relation to undocumented migrant childhoods. Drawing on ethnographic research in Birmingham, UK and Malmö, Sweden between 2014 and 2017, I take as my starting point the everyday life experiences of children and families who have experienced living under an immanent risk of deportation. Through a critical engagement with issues of agency, rights and vulnerability, I contrast the experiences of the children and their families with the development of policies and political debates in both countries. By analysing the contexts of Birmingham, UK and Malmö, Sweden in parallel as sites of irregular migration, I contribute with a clearer understanding of the specific characteristics of how each context constructs and governs irregular migration and how this is experienced by migrants themselves.

In this thesis, I argue that a discussion about the political agency of children positioned as undocumented migrants is crucial for an informed and contextualised understanding of the political conflicts that characterise the issue of undocumented migrant childhoods. Through an analysis of the children and families’ everyday struggles, I highlight the role played by children’s rights as being perhaps the most important resource for enabling limited forms of support for these families from the host societies. However, I also show how the arguments and practices surrounding rights can be mobilised for migration control. In this sense,rights are “dangerous”.

I suggest that if the intergenerational context of undocumented children’s rights is neglected, there is a risk that the human rights of children as well as adults will be marginalised. State actors arguing for the rights of undocumented migrant children often attempt to strengthen children’s deservingness by portraying their parents as “bad parents”who put their children at risk of increased vulnerability. While the state views the parents as putting their children at risk by “hiding” them, the parents view the state as putting their children at risk by trying to deport them. Parents are then forced to act as “humanitarian agents” responsible for caring for the children when state support to the rights-bearing migrant child is limited by the notion of the migrant child at risk of deportation.

This “child migrant paradox” is an overall entrance point from which many of the political issues discussed in the thesis can be traced. The politics of rights in the context of undocumented migration is closely related to processes of vulnerability. Rights are mostly perceived as a matter of implementation while vulnerabilities, which rights are supposed to ameliorate, are mainly understood as descriptively self-evident. In this thesis, I problematise such commonplace understandings of rights and vulnerabilities and theorises them as fundamentally political concepts that need to be understood as enacted and reproduced through different political processes at different scales.

I introduce the concept of “vulnerabilisation” to capture how states first create vulnerability through hostile policies towards undocumented migrants, then label the targeted groups as vulnerable and finally utilise this vulnerability to rationalise the governing of undocumented migrant children and families’ mobility and territorial presence. To enable children’s rights to be a productive tool for challenging the repressive governing of migrant families and children, I argue in this thesis that both the children’s rights paradigm and the vulnerabilisation of migrant childhoods need to be problematised and contextualised. Rights struggles by and on behalf of undocumented migrant children and families thus need to be aware of the fundamentally political character of rights and vulnerability.

This article analyses four different contexts in Sweden where children’s rights have been mobilised to govern vulnerabilised migrant childhoods. The concept of ‘vulnerabilisation’ is suggested to capture the political processes creating the conditions for defining and attributing vulnerability. To enable children’s rights to be a productive tool for challenging the repressive governing of migrant families and children, the article argues for the need of a problematisation and contextualisation of both the children’s rights paradigm and the vulnerabilisation of migrant childhoods.

State actors arguing for the rights of undocumented children often attempt to strengthen children's deservingness by portraying their parents as bad parents who put their children at risk. Through ethnographic observations in Malmö, Sweden and Birmingham, UK, this article shows how such demonization of the parents by the state is not reflected in the everyday life experiences of undocumented families themselves. While the state views the parents as putting their children at risk by ‘hiding’ them, the parents view the state as putting their children at risk by trying to deport them. The article discusses how parents act as ‘humanitarian agents’ responsible for caring for the children when state support to the deserving, rights-bearing child is limited by the notion of the deportable migrant child. These parental practices of unrecognized emotional labour are analysed as mother- work. The interdependent character of family life in deportability is highlighted through how children take on parental responsibilities as well and how stress and knowledge about their irregular situation is shared across generations. To conclude, the article argues that if one neglects the intergenerational context of undocumented children's rights, one risks marginalising the human rights of both children as well as adults.

How is it possible to argue that one group of children should be excluded from education when it has been defined as a fundamental right of all children residing in Sweden? In this article, we explore this question through a comparative reading of two different sets of government reports: the first establishes that »children who reside in Sweden without permission« should have an unrestricted right to education, while the second proposes that so-called »children of vulnerable EU-citizens« should not. These positions appear incommensurable. We suggest, however, that they are thoroughly entan- gled. Under the current regime of migration control, deportation and deportability is what makes it possible for the Swedish government to grant rights on the basis of territorial presence without abandoning its commitment to regulate residence. Thus, the notion that »vulnerable EU-citizens« cannot easily be deported is mobilised to argue that they should be excluded from the right to education. We see this as an expression of how rights are integral to the governance of migrations to and through the European Union.

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.

Drawing on in-depth ethnographic observations among irregularised migrant families in Birmingham, UK, this article discusses how children’s political agency manifests in everyday life. It shows how children who become aware of their legal status as ‘deportable’ reject this subject position and offer their own definitions of who they are and where they belong. Simultaneously, it is argued that children with varying degrees of knowledge about their legal status also express political agency through their struggle to sustain the inclusion they experience. Such expressions highlight the duality of children’s political agency in irregular situations.

Even though ethics should not be instrumentalised, discussing ethical issues with participants and gatekeepers can nevertheless lead to new knowledge. Through examples from eth- nographic research among children and families fearing deporta- tion in Birmingham, UK and Malmö, Sweden, this article reflects upon how an ethics-as-process approach can become part of the knowledge production itself in sensitive and politicised research contexts. This is a result of the ambivalent nature of ethnographic research with vulnerable groups and the article therefore encourag- es researchers to embrace the ambivalences of co-constructing the field, working with gatekeepers and establishing trust and consent to enable a more transparent and reflexive knowledge production. In conclusion, it is suggested that the increased politicisation of the issue of child and family migration will make necessary that researchers, who wish to embrace this ambivalence, align with the self-expressed struggle of participants to enable high-quality partici- patory research among these groups.

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