Sweden's labor crackdown creates a trap: tighter rules worsen migrant exploitation
Sweden's shift toward restrictive work permits for non-EU migrants—marketed as anti-exploitation policy—is actually deepening labor abuse by increasing workers' vulnerability and dependence on employers. The finding challenges policymakers' assumptions that stricter immigration controls protect workers, suggesting instead that precarity itself is being engineered into the system.
Originaltitel: Unfree labor in the neoliberal/far-right nexus: state regulation and precarity among labor migrants in Sweden
While the conditions of labor migrants have been central to academic debates on unfree labor under neoliberalism, less attention has been paid to how the rise of far-right nationalism reshapes these dynamics. This article examines recent shifts in Sweden’s labor migration regime for non-EU/EEA citizens, from a ‘flexible’ system based on employer demand toward restrictive reforms targeting work permits in low-wage sectors, ostensibly to combat exploitation and work-related crime. It advances an analysis of how unfree labor among labor migrants is politically, economically and socially produced and experienced across three moments of the labor relation: entry, extraction and exit. Drawing on policy documents, parliamentary debates and interviews with labor market actors and work permit holders, the article links top-down governance to labor migrants’ lived experiences, exploring how they navigate racialized precarity and their contradictory positioning within the contemporary neoliberal/far-right nexus – as a competitive workforce on the one hand, and as redundant or even detrimental on the other. In doing so, it challenges political explanations of labor market exploitation that focus on immoral employers and complicit workers, instead situating the ‘acceptable’ unfreedom of labor migrants within politically reinforced, unequal and polarizing conditions of work and social reproduction.