This paper explores the precarious working conditions in the Chinese restaurant industry in Sweden -a country considered to have one of Europe's most liberal labour immigration policies. Drawing upon a theoretical framework inspired by scholarship on precarious work and time geography, the paper argues that precarious work performed by migrant labour can be usefully understood through three interrelated temporal processes that, when they work together, produce and maintain precarious work-life situations. They are: (1) work-time arrangements: that is, actual working hours per day and over the annual cycle, the pace and intensity of work and the flexibility demanded of migrant workers in terms of when work is carried out, (2) the spatio-temporal 'waiting zones' indirectly produced by immigration policies that delay full access to labour markets and in which precarious work-time arrangements consequently arise, and (3) migrant workers' imagined futures, which motivate them to accept precarious work-time arrangements during a transitory period. The paper thus also illuminates that the Chinese chefs in Sweden's restaurant industry are not just passive victims of exploitative work-time arrangements. Rather, waiting -for a return to China or settlement in Sweden -may be part of migrants' strategies to achieve certain life course trajectories.Keywords: Sweden, Chinese migrant workers' strategies, liberal migration policies, migration status; permanent residence, precarious working conditions, temporalities 2 IntroductionIn recent years, labour geography has become increasingly concerned with the intersections between migration and precarious employment (e.g. Coe, 2013;Ellis, Wright and Parks, 2007;Lewis et al., 2014;May et al., 2007; Dyer, 2007, 2009;Vosko, 2006;Waite, 2009;Wills et al., 2010). Migrant workers, it is argued, are clustered in particular jobs and segments of the labour market characterised by low pay and insecure employment. In this literature, there is an often implicit discussion about the relationship between precarious work and time. The precarious working conditions of migrant workers are linked to the proliferation of short-term, temporary or casual contracts in advanced capitalist economies (e.g. May et al., 2007;McDowell, Batnitzky and Dyer, 2009;Wills et al., 2010; also see e.g. Amin, 1994;Peck and Theodore, 1998;Rogers and Rogers, 1989;Sassen, 1991).It is also implied that precarious working conditions are not only characterised by low status and low pay but also by uncertainty about working hours, which may be both too many or too few (e.g. McDowell, Batnitzky and Dyer, 2009), and by a lack of regularity and predictability about length of employment and when work will take place (Anderson, 2007). Thus, precarious work among migrant populations, as noted by Anderson (2007), has much to do with matters of time or, more precisely, with a range of temporal uncertainties -about how long employment will last, the number of hours of work each week, and when to be available for work -which ...

This paper challenges the claim that highly skilled professionals are offered almost seamless mobility and a comprehensive set of rights. Focussing on highly skilled professionals in Sweden's information technology industry, it argues that just like the lower skilled, the highly skilled may experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status. It explores these insecurities by conceptualising border crossing as a temporal process that begins with the submission of a work permit application and ends with permanent status (or migrant departure) and which, consequently, spans several years. More pointedly, the paper demonstrates that some highly skilled migrants experience several moments of waiting in relation to their admission, labour market access and settlement. These moments of waiting have spatial and temporal consequences in terms of temporary losses of mobility rights, elongated pathways to citizenship, insecurity of presence and feelings of living in limbo. Importantly, the paper shows that the practices of government institutions are every bit as important as legal frameworks in producing these moments of waiting and that it is therefore necessary to extend the analysis of migration management beyond policy analysis in order to more fully appreciate the situation of the highly skilled.Keywords: highly skilled migration; migration management; borders; time; waiting IntroductionSelective migration policies that favour the immigration of the highly skilled are proliferating. It is widely held that governments in Europe and beyond design immigration policies to attract talented and experienced professionals, offering the highly skilled almost seamless mobility and a comprehensive set of rights including the right to family reunification, spousal access to the labour market, and privileged routes to settlement (e.g. Boeri 2012;Chaloff and Lemaitre 2009;Gabriel and Pellerin 2008;Koslowski 2014;Menz and Caviedes 2010;Ong 1999;Shachar 2006). In this paper, I draw on the case of highly skilled professionals working in the information technology Accepted version 2 (IT) industry in Sweden -a country that introduced an employer-led labour migration policy in December 2008 which has been described as the most liberal among the OECD countries (OECD 2011) -in order to question the claim that the highly skilled are offered seamless mobility and access to labour markets and civil and social entitlements. I argue that the highly skilled may experience a range of insecurities to do with their immigration status, in particular under so called demand-driven programmes based on employer selection, which do not offer permanent status upon arrival. In such ways, while higher skilled migrants undoubtedly tend to enjoy relatively privileged mobility, employment and social rights, they can nonetheless face similar experiences to their lower skilled counterparts who are increasingly channelled into temporary migrant worker programmes that often set migrant workers onto paths of return or circular The notion of tem...

It is now widely held that a variety of intermediary actors, including recruitment and staffing agencies, multinational corporations and local brokers, shape labour migration. This paper argues that in order to better understand the global circulation of labour it is necessary to explore the involvement of these actors in the production of the regulatory spaces through which migrant labour is brokered. Indeed, migration intermediaries do not only navigate borders on behalf of their migrant clients. Nor is 'the state' primarily a backdrop against which the understanding of the role of intermediaries may be developed. Instead, we argue, regulatory spaces of labour migration are made and remade through direct and indirect exchanges and interactions between intermediaries and state actors. Through an analysis of three moments of regulatory change in Sweden, the paper shows that such interaction does not take place in an even landscape but, rather, that the ability of migration intermediaries to influence the regulation of migration lies in the capacity to form close relationships or establish a powerful presence. A focus on the dynamic co-production of regulatory spaces by intermediaries and state actors, in our view, offers a more nuanced account of how labour migration currently is brokered and regulated.

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Labour migrants seeking work and employment increasingly find themselves having to negotiate an ambiguous migrant status that leaves them neither fully included, nor fully excluded, from a political community. Of late, there has been a recognition that such ambiguity arises as much from temporal as spatial border management practices. Rather than consider time and temporality as integral to the distorted spatiality of contemporary political borders, however, the tendency has been to treat the former as a supplement to the latter. In this paper, we set out to show how time and space work through one another to place migrant workers partly on the 'inside', partly on the 'outside', by selectively combining their pre-and post-entry experiences. In order to make sense of this series of temporal and spatial entanglements, we advance a particular topological reading that aims to show how complex migrant positions are produced and maintained by bringing the times before and after the border into play as part of what enables governments to include and exclude labour migrants in a more differentiated manner. Such regulated time-spaces, of which we outline two, indefinite exclusion and suspended inclusion, in our view, offer a more accurate account of the ways in which migrant workers are simultaneously included and excluded.