Swedish welfare workers bypass asylum restrictions through grassroots alliances
When Sweden tightened asylum policies after 2015, social workers formed unauthorized partnerships with nonprofits to ensure young migrants received care and support. The strategy reveals how frontline professionals navigate conflicting mandates—a model with implications for how welfare systems function when policy and practice diverge.
Originaltitel: Between control and a politics of care: Strategies for ethical welfare work under restrictive Swedish migration policies
<p>Following legal and welfare restrictions imposed on asylum seekers in Sweden after 2015, new alliances emerged within and beyond professional social work and welfare institutions. This article examines how welfare professionals, in collaboration with civil society actors, have developed strategies to ensure that young asylum-seeking people have access to rights and welfare interventions that secure livelihoods. The data are based on interviews with welfare professionals and other actors involved in solidarity practices within civil society and asylum rights movements. The analysis draws on Joan Tronto’s political ethics of care to conceptualise solidarity as a democratic, political and relational practice. It also engages with scholarship on transversal solidarity to describe how forms of care, resistance and collective responsibility emerge across institutional and civic boundaries in response to increasingly restrictive asylum law and practice. Drawing onTronto’s concept of ‘caring with’, we conceptualise ethical care as a practice shaped through crossboundary organising and collective responsibility under restrictive migration policies. We analyse three strategies that welfare professionals have developed to counter the effects of increasingly restrictive asylum policy: open strategies from the inside, undercover strategies from the inside and becoming double agents of solidarity, through which care is enacted as a political stance.</p>