In Sweden and other countries, a clear trend in migration law in recent years has been a shift from permanent towards temporary: time-limited residence permits, revocation of refugee status, higher thresholds for citizenship. This can be seen as a shift in the perception of legal status, as stability and long-term perspectives have long been the basis for, among other things, citizenship and residence permits. Although a legal status is not necessarily permanent by definition – it can be obtained, lost, or terminated – long-term stability is crucial, particularly from a legal security perspective, where predictability is a fundamental value in a rule-of-law state.
Many changes in the stability of legal status in these areas revolve around time: temporary permits, limited application periods, increased residency requirements for citizenship eligibility. In this project – which combines legal theory, national and international migration law, as well as migration and citizenship studies – we investigate how the use of time as a tool to control migration affects the stability and predictability of different types of legal status. We also examine the consequences of destabilizing legal status for individuals' rights and responsibilities. We do this by analyzing how time has been used as a tool in Swedish migration law to regulate migration over the past 25 years and by developing new theory on how time manifests itself in the legal field – what we call "legal time." We study Sweden due to significant changes in migration policy in recent years, but our results will be relevant to other countries as well.
The research is crucial as it can provide in-depth knowledge about the significance of time in migration law and the consequences of undermining the stability of individuals' legal status, which, in turn, can affect people's ability to make informed life choices. In a time of changing migration policies, such knowledge is of great importance.
