Binds and Bridges to Protection in Crisis: The Case of Unaccompanied Refugee Youth from Afghanistan in Sweden

Abstract

The Swedish policy known as Gymnasielagen, or the High School Law, allows for approximately 9000 refugees who arrived as unaccompanied minors, but had their asylum applications rejected, to receive permanent residency if employed within six months of completing their education. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for most young refugees to obtain long-term employment that quickly. A proposed reform to introduce the High School Law, which would have improved their opportunities for employment, was rejected after highly publicized debate among the political parties. This chapter details how this reform was framed by Swedish political parties throughout 2020 and 2021, using parliamentary transcripts, supplemented by news media and social media material. Two additional instances of refugee reception to Sweden are used as contrasting cases: that of Afghan refugees following the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 and that of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis combines impressionistic approaches to interpretive policy analysis with the ideational turn in institutionalism and governance research. The chapter highlights that, while a crisis is, by definition, unexpected, context-specific policy legacies and hegemonic problem definitions determine who is viewed as worthy of policy reforms addressing their needs.