The distorted shape of many of today’s political borders has been widely noted. An increasingly sprawling body of literature in geography and beyond has explored the growing spatial ambiguity of borders which are now seen as both externalised and networked throughout society. There is some recognition that the spatial reconfiguration of borders to appear in locations that challenge conventional assumptions about the relationship between state, border and territory may involve a temporal dimension; however, the many ways in which time and space work through each other to shape what it means to move in and out of a political community have remained largely overlooked. In order to make sense of the complex temporal and spatial entanglements involved in contemporary bordering processes, I advance an understanding of borders as devices which selectively contract and expand the distance between internal and external spaces and mobilise and immobilise migrants by altering the speed and rhythm of their movements. A focus on dynamic, fragmented and ephemeral border timespaces, in my view, offers a more nuanced account of how the cross-border movements of migrants are currently regulated.

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.

The role of migration mediation in the global circulation of labour has been receiving increasing attention. Channel is a frequently used, but under-theorised, concept in such studies. Drawing on mobilities perspectives, especially migration infrastructure and three aspects of mobility (route, speed and friction), this paper fosters a framework – channelling through bureaucracy. It seeks to go beyond seeing channels as structure and mechanism to argue channelling is a productive and differentiating process whereby both state and intermediary actors actively intervene in migrants’ mobilities. Based on documentary analysis, interviews and participatory observation in Sweden and China, we demonstrate how, in the last decade, migration intermediaries and state actors channel Chinese migrants’ mobilities in relation to three major shifts in Swedish immigration bureaucracy. The empirical findings illustrate that, as a concept, channelling illustrates, specifically, how conflicts and collaborations between the regulatory and commercial dimensions of migration mediation drive new modes of operation and self-reinforcing of migration infrastructures. Additionally, the study indicates how channelling operates through these three specific aspects of mobility to include, exclude, favour, disadvantage, filter and direct different intermediary actors and migrants. Future research could draw on mobilities studies and the specific forms of interactions between state actors and migration intermediaries to deepen the understanding of migration mediation.

A small but growing literature on occupational (mis)match, i.e. whether the educational requirements of one’s occupation correspond to one’s level of education, shows that foreign-born individuals tend to be overeducated to a larger extent than the native-born. Although there is some comparative research across countries, little is known about the geographical variation in occupational (mis)match within countries. This paper aims to describe and explain the patterns of occupational (mis)match among refugees and family migrants in Sweden, with a particular emphasis on their geographical dimension. Applying descriptive and regression analysis to individual-level longitudinal register data, it examines the occurrence of occupational (mis)match among refugee and family migrants who gained residency in Sweden between 2001 and 2014. The results indicate a moderate significance of the regional context for migrants’ likelihood of achieving occupational match. After three years in Sweden, migrants residing in the capital region of Stockholm are the most likely to find a job in line with their qualifications, followed by migrants in Gothenburg and migrants in small city/rural regions. After eight years, however, the only statistically significant difference is between migrants in Stockholm, relative to migrants in the less prosperous region of Malmö. A plausible explanation is that highly educated migrants who achieve occupational match tend to be employed in occupations that are in demand all across the country, notably in the healthcare and education sectors. In addition, the study shows that the validation/assessment of foreign education as well as education obtained in Sweden are positively associated with occupational match.

Tidigare forskning om kvalifikationsmatchning, det vill säga forskning som undersöker om individer har ett yrke som motsvarar deras utbildningsnivå eller inte, visar att utrikes födda tenderar att vara överutbildade i större utsträckning än de som är födda i landet. Jämfört med inrikes födda har de med andra ord oftare en formell utbildning som är högre än vad deras arbete kräver. Den här forskningen har i viss utsträckning jämfört graden av kvalifikationsmatchning för den utrikesfödda befolkningen i olika länder. Däremot saknas kunskap om hur graden av kvalifikationsmatchning skiljer sig åt inom länder. Syftet med den här artikeln är därför att beskriva och förklara mönster i kvalifikationsmatchning för flyktingar och familjemigranter i Sverige med särskild tonvikt på regionala skillnader. Den undersöker förekomsten av kvalifikationsmatchning för flyktingar och familjemigranter som fick uppehållstillstånd i Sverige mellan 2001 och 2014 med hjälp av deskriptiv statistik och regressionsanalys utförd på longitudinella registerdata på individnivå. Resultaten visar att det finns vissa regionala skillnader i kvalifikationsmatchning för flyktingar och familjemigranter. Initialt är de som är bosatta i Stockholm–men även i Göteborg och i mindre tätorter och landsbygdskommuner–kvalifikationsmatchade i större utsträckning än flyktingar och familjemigranter i andra typer av regioner. De regionala skillnaderna i kvalifikationsmatchning minskar dock över tid och på längre sikt verkar bosättningsort inte utgöra något större hinder för att uppnå kvalifikationsmatchning. Efter åtta i Sverige har de geografiska skillnaderna i kvalifikationsmatchning utjämnats och den enda statistiskt säkerställda skillnad som kvarstår är den mellan flyktingar och familjemigranter som är bosatta i Stockholm, där sannolikheten att hitta ett arbete som motsvarar utbildningsnivå fortsatt är större, respektive Malmö, där samma grad av kvalifikationsmatchning inte uppnås. En möjlig förklaring är att de högutbildade flyktingar och familjemigranter som uppnår kvalifikationsmatchning ofta gör det i yrken där det finns en efterfrågan över hela landet, särskilt inom vård- och utbildningssektorn. Dessutom visar studien att validering och bedömning av utländska utbildningar samt utbildningar som erhållits i Sverige oftare leder till kvalifikationsmatchning

This article introduces a special issue on the labour market integration of highly skilled refugees in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands, three countries that received a large number of asylum seekers in the mid-2010s. Authorities have devised various policies that aim to speed up the labour market integration process for refugees. This article critically examines normalized assumptions about refugees and the causes for their low employment rates that inform existing labour market integration initiatives. We pay particular attention to highly skilled refugees, who generally want to work but tend to experience difficulties finding employment commensurate with their educational attainment and professional expertise. This issue warrants more attention as one in five refugees in Europe has completed a tertiary education. 

Non-state actors are increasingly involved in enforcing immigration policies. Of late, there has been growing recognition that greater involvement of non-state actors has contributed to reconfiguring migration governance in a spatial sense. Scalar literature conceptualises the involvement of non-state actors as a move by immigration authorities to use actors beyond the state to enforce immigration policies. Network-inspired analysis, on the other hand, draws attention to attempts by non-state actors to form alliances in order to influence immigration policy. In this paper, we set out to show that other spatial shifts are at play in contemporary migration governance. In order to make sense of these spatial shifts, we advance a reading of migration governance which aims to show how efforts to manage migration are the result of, and result in, strategic attempts by state and non-state actors to enrol others, establish a sense of presence and build relationships of proximity and reach. We provide one example of this, involving an administrative alliance between a Swedish government agency and two intermediary actors in labour migration: employers in the information-technology industry and immigration service providers. By drawing attention to spatial shifts in migration governance such as this, new light can be shed on the ways in which the governance of migration recasts relationships between state and non-state actors.

This paper argues that cultural and political strategies that appeal to citizenship and national identity can be used to regulate flows across borders. In this process, citizen bodies may be enrolled as key agents. Drawing on the National Friday Wear programme – a Ghanaian government initiative intended to encourage white-collar workers to dress their bodies in domestically produced textiles on Fridays to reduce the consumption, and thereby also the inflow, of foreign textiles – the paper illustrates that citizen bodies are both spaces upon which borders are inscribed and geopolitical actors that perform borders on behalf of the nation-state. 

The forest berry industry in northern Sweden operates within a competitive global market for nutritious wild berries and is dependent on seasonal migrant workers. This chapter analyses actual wage levels of these workers after a series of new regulations surrounding migration and labour standards. Labour standards improved in Sweden in 2010 with the implementation of collective agreements and work contracts for non-European Economic Area berry pickers, the only country employing such standards within this type of industry. We discuss how, despite these improvements, Thai migrant berry pickers continue to be exploited in a process that we theorise as subordinated inclusion. The chapter is based on unique survey material with berry pickers and in-depth interviews with migrant workers during the berry season in Sweden and off-season in Thailand. We focus on actual wages, while also placing our analysis in the context of the industry’s peripherality and changing geographies of production and consumption. One third of the workers in the survey reported earnings below the income they are entitled to according to the work contracts. Despite deploying varying forms of resistance and the recent regulation of labour standards for migrant labour, we conclude that the fulfilment of their formal rights is still lacking. 

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.