Living within temporally thick borders: IT professionals’ experiences of Swedish immigration policy and practice

Abstract

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...

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