To Örebro University

This article aims to explore lived experiences of the asylum process in Sweden from the perspectives of unaccompanied young people and social workers who work with these young people during a period when Swedish asylum-laws went through a transformation. Young people are expected to become ‘integrated’ and create a sense of belonging in Sweden within a temporary perspective, and the social workers are supposed to work towards integration during more prolonged waiting times and more restrictive asylum politics. The article is based on interviews with young people with current or recent experience of the asylum process and social workers in a non-governmental organization. The results are centred around three themes: (1) the deportable young person; (2) time and waiting; (3) the contagious deportability and state of waiting. These are related to the asylum process from both the young people’s perspectives and how the social workers experience and talk about the young people’s situations. The findings show that the asylum-law changes have created an imminent threat of becoming deported, which puts young people in a state of deportability. There are demands to both wait and ‘integrate’ during this time, which is understood as a paradox of waiting. The deportability is also contagious, affecting the social workers who are supposed to provide support with integration in the middle of the precarious time the state of deportability and waiting creates.

Belonging is a contested concept, and for young people arriving unaccompanied by parents to seek asylum in Sweden, belonging is conditional. The aim of this thesis is thus to analyse belonging in the context of an NGO mentoring programme for young people defined as unaccompanied in Sweden. By intersecting different dimensions of belonging, this is studied both from the young people’s own perspective and within the work of the mentoring programme. The thesis builds on interviews, participant observations, and policy documents gathered from the NGO mentoring programme, which more specifically works with ‘unaccompanied’ young people placed in kinship care in a Swedish suburban neighbourhood to support their establishment in Sweden. Participating in the study are young people involved in the programme and the employed mentors. The results show that the young people create a sense of belonging through transnational and local migrant networks, while the NGO perceives the young people’s situations in kinship care and in the Swedish suburban neighbourhood as limited. The mentoring programme’s work to promote establishment is intended to help the young people to overcome possible boundaries, and to reach a belonging to Swedish society. As such, the work can be interpreted as a form of boundary work. However, this work risks producing new boundaries – those between a desired, but imagined, ‘Swedish community of value’, and the migrant ‘other’. Hierarchies of belonging are thus created, within which the young people must strive to become ‘good Swedes’ to be seen as established in society. The thesis also shows how these boundaries can be challenged within social work by acting against racial structures and imagined collective communities. It thus argues for the importance of acknowledging and actively working with young people’s transnational and local networks to avoid the reproduction of boundaries.

Young migrants defined as ‘unaccompanied’ tend to be constructed as a homogeneous group with specific vulnerabilities and strengths in social work practice. ‘Unaccompanied’ young migrants placed in kinship care in Sweden are constructed with further vulnerabilities. Such constructions of these young people and their situations may have consequences for how social support for them is designed. The aim of this study is to explore how the social workers employed at a non-governmental organisation mentoring programme construct young migrants’ situations in kinship care in a Swedish suburb, and if and how these constructions change during the course of the programme. Methods used are semi-structured interviews with the social workers at the youth centre where the mentoring work takes place and analysis of the non-governmental organisation’s policy documents. The results consist of three constructions of situations the young people are in: (1) loneliness and (a lack of) support in the kinship homes; (2) alienation in the local neighbourhood and the kinship home and (3) social, cultural and family contexts creating a sense of safety. The results show variation in how the mentors describe each situation with both vulnerabilities and strengths. This highlights a complexity in the constructions that contests the image of young migrants in kinship care as merely vulnerable. These results reveal consideration of individual differences and contexts, and are used to discuss how people’s struggles and resources can be dealt with in social work.