“Blir du lönsam, lille invandrare?”

Sammanfattning

The “teenage deportations” emerged from more austere migration politics and have received considerable medial attention in Sweden since early January. This paper broadens the literature on the depiction of migrants through this contemporary case and expands previous research, primarily focused on ethnicity, gender and religion. A qualitative critical discourse analysis (CDA), combined with mediatization theory and intersectional theory, explores how age, social class, ethnicity and gender can be integrated to analyze the medial construction of the “desirable” teenage migrant. The discursive construction is analyzed in eight articles published by the major Swedish morning newspapers – Dagens Nyheter and Svenska Dagbladet – between February 18th and March 15th 2026, using Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model. The findings indicate that “desirable” teenage migrants are consistently depicted as integrated, diligent, well-educated, hardworking and law-abiding, which through discursive neutralisation processes, constitutes legitimate reasons for them to stay in Sweden. Simultaneously, discursive dichotomies emerge, most prominently “us versus them” – an effective discursive tool to include and exclude individuals from the national identity. The study emphasizes how established media mirrors and reproduces underlying power relations connected to intersectional perspectives and illustrates how conditional inclusion within Swedish media migration discourse shapes perceptions of legitimacy, identity and belonging.