Maja Sager

During 2015 the struggles of people who searched to enter and move across Europe became increasingly intense with unthinkable numbers of deaths on the sea and other dangerous parts of the various alternative routes to and across Europe. Initially Europe witnessed a popular mobilisation of solidarity and demands for a humane response articulated through government officials as well as in the media. However, the government responses changed rapidly and were replaced by a narrative of crisis and a steering towards harsher regulations and closed borders aiming to limit the numbers of asylum seekers. In Sweden, following the construction of a narrative of crisis the Social democratic/Green party government and the right wing parties launched an initial migration political agreement in October 2015 – “Insatser med anledning av flyktingkrisen” (“Interventions regarding the refugee crisis”) and on November 25, 2015, the government launched further interventions. These interventions imply a critical shift in the Swedish migration and asylum regulations and we argue that shift to visibly and bluntly enforcing the links between migration politics and labour politics. In other words: to abandon a human rights perspective. In this paper our analysis focuses on the Swedish migration politics’ switching from permanent to temporary residence permits and the racialisation of service and domestic work low pay sectors. We explore how a racialised and gendered continuum of deportability is constructed, experienced and contested in the context of these government responses to present migrations. The analysis builds on two kinds of material: government documents and press releases regarding the migration political interventions, and ethnographic material from two different studies exploring structures and experiences of irregularity in the Swedish context (Sager 2011, Öberg 2015).