Living with Uncertainty : Skilled South Asian Migrants’ Well-being under Restrictive Migration Policies in Post-2022 Sweden

Sammanfattning

This thesis examines how South Asian skilled migrants experience restrictive migration policy conditions in post-2022 Sweden, with particular attention to well-being, family responsibility, residence insecurity, and settlement intention. The thesis is based on 15 qualitative semi-structured interviews and discusses the policy uncertainty migrants encounter in daily life. The focus on South Asian skilled migrants is significant because many of these participants arrived with family responsibilities, prior education, skilled work experience, and high aspirations to develop their careers, improve their quality of life, and secure their long-term settlement, yet they encounter a migration system that is primarily focused on managing humanitarian migrants. The study is guided by the aspirations-capabilities framework, Luhmann’s theory of risk and the concept of the social grammar of future-making. The findings are organized around four themes: administrative risk and residence insecurity, family-associated uncertainty and dependent futures, well-being under conditional security, and changing decisions and conditional future-making. The overall results indicate that the participants tended to appreciate the safety, education, healthcare, work-life balance, and professional opportunities offered in Sweden, but their future was left uncertain due to migration policy changes that are increasing salary thresholds, employer support, permit renewals, family eligibility, permanent residence, and citizenship pathways. These findings suggest that professional capability does not automatically guarantee settlement security; rather, the future-making of skilled migrants is undermined by restrictive migration governance.