The Expanding Logic of Temporary Legality

By Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz

Since June 2026, the Swedish government has enacted a series of draconian immigration reforms that have eradicated permanent residence permits for people granted international protection, raised the threshold for citizenship, and expanded the grounds on which residence permits can be denied or revoked. In May 2026, the Swedish Parliament also voted in favor of a constitutional amendment that would allow Swedish citizenship to be revoked from dual nationals on broadly defined grounds. These domestic developments converge with the implementation of the EU Pact on Migration and Asylum in June 2026, which significantly limits opportunities for asylum through mechanisms such as accelerated border procedures and the legal fiction of non-entry.[1] Together, these measures point towards a broader transformation: the replacement of permanent status with a condition of protracted temporariness and a continuous threat of deportation. Across Europe, legal status is increasingly organized through temporary and conditional forms of protection, ensuring that the possibility of removal remains ever-present long after protection has been granted.  

Sweden, often imagined as a humanitarian exception in Europe, is now competing to lead the dismantling of asylum. This transformation did not begin with the current government. A significant turning point came in 2016 when temporary residence permits became the default form of protection for most people granted international protection, replacing a system in which permanent residence permits had long been the norm. Since then, the conditions attached to legal status have become increasingly restrictive through limitations on family reunification, stricter pathways to citizenship, and the removal of grounds for protection. The measures implemented beginning in June 2026 should therefore be understood less as isolated reforms than as an intensification of a longer process of making legal status more temporary, conditional, and revocable.  

I conceptualize this shift and its implications as “temporary legality”: a condition of prolonged uncertainty marked by legal conditionality and the persistent threat of deportation. Building on scholarship in migration and border studies on deportability, the legal production of illegality, and precarious forms of legal status, I use the concept to analyze how spatial, temporal, and racial dimensions converge in shaping access to legal status and protection (Calavita, 1998; Coutin, 1996, 2004; De Genova, 2005; Goldring & Landolt, 2011; Kretsedemas, 2012).  

For many people who have spent years, or even decades, building their lives in Sweden, the gradual transformation of the asylum system since 2016 casts doubt on the stability they were once promised, leaving them with the sense that their right to remain can be questioned, reassessed, or withdrawn at any time.  

This is the case for my friend Amir, whom I got to know through my involvement with an activist network in Malmö that offers legal advice and social support to undocumented migrants. Amir was just 15 years old when we first met in 2011. Between 2011 and 2014, much of my everyday life revolved around him and a group of other teenagers, most of whom had fled Afghanistan.Due to the Dublin Regulation[2], they were forced to live clandestinely for 18 months until they could seek asylum in Sweden. During those years, I became closely involved in supporting some of these boys through legal processes and the practical challenges of life as undocumented, from housing and healthcare to food, education, and social support. This also meant that I shared and celebrated the moment when some of them finally received a letter or a phone call from their lawyer announcing that they had been granted refugee status and obtained a permanent residence permit, after years of struggle and endless waiting while en route to and through Europe. Others were apprehended by the police before the 18 months had passed and were deported back to the first European country of asylum or to Afghanistan, despite having never set foot there, as many had grown up undocumented in Iran.  

Yet a significant number of the teenagers who received permanent residence permits more than a decade ago are still not Swedish citizens. Amir was granted refugee status and a permanent residence permit in 2013, but his citizenship application was rejected in 2023 because he was unable to prove his identity, partly because identity documents issued by Afghan authorities are often not accepted as sufficiently reliable evidence. His disappointment, stress, and anger upon receiving the negative decision reflect the effects of the current politics, which eradicate permanent status and make the threshold to citizenship steeper or, for some, inaccessible altogether. Amir arrived in Sweden at a time when permanent refugee protection was the norm. However, despite having permanent residency, he felt the stress and prolonged fear of deportation that the negative decision entails. Although it is a different type of fear compared to the immediate threat of deportation that Amir felt whenever he spotted a police officer as we walked the streets of Malmö in 2011–2013, when he was in a condition of undocumentedness, he nonetheless experiences a continuous state of anxiety and uncertainty.

In September 2025, the Swedish government introduced an inquiry to retroactively revoke permanent residence permits and replace them with temporary ones for people like Amir. The government argued that this reform was meant to encourage non-citizens to want to become Swedish citizens, while making it increasingly difficult to qualify for citizenship. Amir was denied Swedish citizenship before the requirements for language proficiency, knowledge of society, good conduct, and a minimum income were even introduced, due to circumstances beyond his control.   

As of late August 2026, the government has not formally dropped the proposal to retroactively convert permanent permits into temporary permits, but due to political disagreements within the right-wing governing coalition, the proposal has been put on hold and is not currently moving forward. Instead, the government has focused on ending the issuance of new permanent residence permits, as was enshrined in legislation in July 2026. If the proposal to retroactively convert permanent residence permits were to become reality, however, Amir would lose the permanent status he secured more than a decade ago and find his future in Sweden tied to a temporary and reassessable legal status.  

However, the instability and insecurity that continue to shape Amir’s life more than a decade after receiving protection cannot be explained by national legislation alone. Rather, it emerges through the intersection of national migration policies and local welfare arrangements, where legal status is governed, interpreted, and unevenly enforced.  

His situation is not exceptional. Rather, it reflects a broader transformation in Swedish migration policy, in which the possibility of deportation no longer disappears once protection has been granted but is continually reproduced through an expanding range of laws, policies, and institutions. The border increasingly stretches across both space and time, with border control becoming embedded in policy domains far beyond the immigration system itself.  

In Temporary Legality: Regulating Asylum through Housing and Education in the Swedish Welfare State (2026), I show how the normalization of temporary legal status embeds border control within welfare policy and practice, devolving border functions into areas such as housing and education, which are shaped differently within Sweden’s 290 municipalities. I explain how housing, education, and language requirements for permanent residence and family reunification effectively turn municipal welfare policies into instruments of border control. In this process, responsibility for regulating access to legal status increasingly shifts to municipal policymakers and frontline welfare practitioners. These actors determine access to resources that have become tied to migration status, whether through language assessments, grades, and other educational requirements for residence permits, or through local housing conditions that shape opportunities for family reunification. Welfare practitioners are thus increasingly enlisted as border workers, exercising power over who can maintain legal status, secure long-term residence, or reunite with family members.  

A recent amendment to Sweden’s family migration legislation, introduced in August 2026, illustrates how border control is increasingly exercised through welfare policies and administrative decisions far beyond the immigration system itself. Since 2010, access to family reunification in Sweden has increasingly been conditioned by income and housing requirements. The most significant change introduced in August 2026 is that these requirements now also apply to the renewal of temporary residence permits. At the same time, the income threshold was increased by approximately 30 to 35 percent, and now, in practice, requires around SEK 53,000 (€4,800) per month for a family of two adults and two children, alongside housing of sufficient size and standard. The new threshold also sits above the Swedish median wage, making family life contingent on an income level that many full-time workers do not reach. Access to adequate housing and income is therefore no longer only a condition for bringing family members to Sweden; it has become a condition for remaining together in the country.  

In this way, decisions and circumstances that are often shaped outside the migration system, such as local housing conditions, housing availability, labor market participation, and welfare administration, become increasingly consequential for residence rights. A sponsoring family member who loses a job, cannot secure adequate housing, or has another child that raises the maintenance threshold may no longer meet the requirements for renewing a residence permit. If income requirements already force some families to leave children behind, the new rules may also influence decisions about whether to have additional children at all (Svenska Röda Korset 2025; Jansson-Keshavarz et al. 2024). The result is a racialized condition of temporary legality under which access to housing, stable employment, and other welfare-mediated resources no longer merely shape people’s living conditions; they become mechanisms through which legal status, family reunification, and the right to remain are governed.  

Backed by the Sweden Democrats, an ethno-nationalist anti-immigration party with roots in neo-Nazi movements, the current government has introduced migration restrictions at an unprecedented pace. The government’s stated aim has been to deliver what it calls a “paradigm shift” in migration policy before the general election on 13 September 2026. Recent reforms suggest not only a tightening of asylum and residence policies, but a broader reconfiguration of membership itself, making both residence and citizenship increasingly conditional through requirements that are difficult to meet, unevenly applied, and often vaguely defined.  

One example is the introduction of the new “good conduct” requirement, which expands the grounds for denying or revoking residence permits based on conduct or way of life rather than criminal convictions. Lack of “good conduct” is a broad and loosely defined concept that may include repeatedly breaking rules, providing incorrect information, unpaid debts, alleged dishonesty in relation to welfare benefits, or maintaining contacts and social relationships that authorities associate with criminal networks, extremist groups, or terrorist organizations. Because the concept remains undefined in law, questions have been raised about how broadly it may be interpreted in practice and whether expressions of opinion, political activism, or participation in public debate could eventually become relevant in decisions concerning legal status. Although asylum-related residence permits are largely exempt from the “good conduct” requirement for permit extensions and revocations due to protections under EU law, it applies to several other residence permit categories, including family migration, as well as to all applicants for Swedish citizenship. The reform, therefore, illustrates how the logic of temporary legality is expanding beyond asylum policy and into other domains governing legal status and membership. Residence rights increasingly depend not only on what people do, but also on how state authorities interpret their conduct, social relations, and way of life.  

The government’s proposal in May 2026 to revoke citizenship from dual nationals reflects a similar logic. As Ayelet Shachar (2009) argued almost two decades ago, birthright citizenship in affluent societies can be understood as a form of inherited property transmitted by law to a restricted group. Being born with Swedish citizenship remains a significant privilege. However, under current proposals, that privilege would no longer be equally secure for all citizens. If adopted, the proposal would create two tiers of citizenship: one more secure and one more precarious. In practice, those most exposed to the risk of citizenship deprivation would be racialized citizens and citizens with cross-border family histories, including people born and raised in Sweden.

Sweden is, of course, not the first country to move in this direction. In the UK, the British Nationality Act of 1981 permits the revocation of citizenship if it is considered “conducive to the public good” to do so and if the person is not left stateless. The case of Shamima Begum is a case in point. After traveling to Syria at the age of 15 to join the Islamic State, her British citizenship was revoked in 2019. Although she was not a dual national, the UK government argued that she was entitled to Bangladeshi citizenship through her parents. Bangladesh rejected that claim, leaving Begum de facto stateless. As Bharat Malkani (2024) argues, cases such as Begum’s reveal how citizenship revocation reproduces a racialized two-tier system of membership reminiscent of colonial legal regimes. Those racialized as something other than White British, or, in the Swedish context, White Swedish, are disproportionately exposed to citizenship deprivation because they are more likely to be perceived as having another nationality to which they can supposedly be removed.

The Swedish proposal reflects a similar logic. While citizenship would remain formally equal, security of membership would become unevenly distributed in practice. In this way, “foreign background” functions as a proxy for race in the production of legal difference. In the Nordics, Denmark, Finland, and Norway already allow citizenship to be revoked in certain cases. Sweden’s proposal aims to broaden the scope for citizenship revocation, allowing dual citizens to lose their Swedish citizenship not only if it was obtained through fraud, but also for crimes considered to seriously harm Sweden’s “vital interests”. This includes espionage and terrorism, but also, for example, serious economic crimes, welfare fraud, and certain forms of serious gang-related crime[3]. What exactly counts as harming Sweden’s “vital interests” remains unclear, however, which raises concerns similar to those with the “good conduct” requirement – about where the line would be drawn and the discriminatory effects on racialized citizens.

My focus on temporary legality is an invitation to understand the dismantling of asylum not only at and beyond Europe’s borders, but also its transformation within them. The gradual replacement of permanent status with conditional forms of residence and citizenship creates a system in which deportability is never entirely absent but is continually reorganized through welfare policies, family life, ways of being, and everyday administrative practices. Rather than marking the end of asylum through exclusion alone, contemporary bordering increasingly operates through the logic of temporary legality that enforces indefinite temporariness.

Works Cited‍ ‍

Calavita, K. (1998). Immigration, law, and marginalization in a global economy: Notes from Spain. Law and Society Review, 32(3), 529–566. https://doi.org/10.2307/827756‍ ‍

Coutin, B. S. (1996). Differences within accounts of U.S. immigration law. Political  and  Legal  Anthropology  Review,  19(1),  11–19. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24498059‍ ‍

Coutin, B. S. (2004). Legalizing moves: Salvadoran immigrants’ struggle for U.S. residency. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 27(1), 142–160. https://doi.org/10.1525/pol.2004.27.1.142‍ ‍

Coutin, B. S. (2011). The rights of noncitizens in the United States. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 7, 89–105. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-lawsocsci-102510-105525‍ ‍

De Genova, N. (2002). Migrant “illegality” and deportability in everyday life. Annual Review of Anthropology, 31, 419–447. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.anthro.31.040402.085432‍ ‍

De Genova, N. (2005). Working the Boundaries: Race, Space and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago. Duke University Press.

Goldring, L., & Landolt, P. (2011). Caught in the work–citizenship matrix: The lasting effects of precarious legal status on work for Toronto immigrants. Globalizations, 8(3), 325–341. https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2011.576850‍ ‍

Jansson-Keshavarz, S. (2026). Temporary Legality: Regulating Asylum through Housing and Education in the Swedish Welfare State (Vol. 928). Linköping University Electronic Press.

Jansson-Keshavarz, S., Krifors, K., & Nordling, V. (2025). Housing and temporary legality: The evictability and settlement of refugees in Swedish municipalities. Critical Social Policy, 45(1), 115-137.

Kretsedemas, P. (2012). The limits of control: Neo-liberal policy priorities and the US non-immigrant flow. International Migration, 50(S1), e1–e18. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2435.2011.00696.x‍ ‍

Malkani, B. (2024). Racial Justice and the Limits of Law. Bristol University press. Shachar, A. (2009). The birthright lottery: Citizenship and global inequality. Harvard University Press.

Svenska Röda Korset. (2025). När lagen skiljer oss åt: Vittnesmål från människor som nekas familjeåterförening på grund av försörjningskravet [When the law keeps us apart: Testimonies from people denied family reunification due to maintenance requirements].

Svenska Röda Korset. https://www.rodakorset.se/contentassets/63103eedc95342d59fb15bb70240f6fb/srk_familjeaterforening_digital_2.pdf‍ ‍
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Endnotes

[1] Under the legal fiction of non-entry, people seeking asylum who are subject to border procedures are treated as if they have not formally entered the territory of the state, even when they are physically present within its borders.

[2] The Dublin Regulation determines which EU country is responsible for examining an asylum application, usually the first country a person enters.

[3] Although the proposal extends beyond organized crime, public and political discussions have often centered on gang-related violence. High-profile criminal incidents have become important reference points in arguments for expanding state powers over migration and citizenship. Government representatives have repeatedly linked the proposal to concerns about organized crime, including individuals with dual citizenship who are alleged to direct serious crimes in Sweden from abroad.

Sofi Jansson-Keshavarz is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Migration and Integration Research (CMIR) at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research examines how asylum, residence, and citizenship are increasingly shaped by temporality, conditionality, and racialized forms of governance. She holds a PhD in Welfare Law from Linköping University and has published widely on the intersections of migration law and welfare.