Spring Exchange 2009
May 7 - 16 2009
Theme "Differentiation in reception centres"
Immigrationsverket, Sweden
Cesare Vespignani
Federal Office of Migration
Switzerland
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On differentiation in Reception Centers
The Swedish Board of Migration
The Swedish Board of Migration maintains several Reception Centers located at
different locations in the country. Of these, those at Malmö, Göteborg and Stockholm
are the most important ones. Each Center is connected with other 5 or 6 Reception
Units distributed in different localities near the Center. While the Centers take care of
the initial registration procedures, the verbal examination and the decision of the
asylum case, the Units are mainly responsible for the accommodation of the asylum
seekers in apartments in small cities and villages in the region. While the asylum
investigation is in progress, the Swedish Migration Board offers temporary
accommodation. At the time of writing, the Reception Unit of Kristianstad, the Unit I
visited during my Exchange Program, located in the southern region of Scania, is
responsible of circa 780 asylum seekers accommodated in circa 250 apartments
distributed in several communes around Kristianstad. The majority of the
apartments belongs to the local municipalities, some, however, are also privately
owned and rented to the Migration Unit under a special rental agreement. If the
asylum seeker cannot afford to pay the rent, the Board of Migration takes care of it.
According to Swedish Migration procedure, asylum seekers are allowed to
accommodate themselves with relatives or friends, as long as they leave an address
to the Board of Migration. If the asylum seeker is capable and willing to arrange for
his or her own accommodation, he or she must, as a rule, meet the cost of the
accommodation. Based on a rough estimate, circa 50% of the asylum seekers
currently present in Sweden are accommodated among relatives or friends.
The reception centers
The reception center is the place where the asylum seeking application begins. It is
here where the photo and the finger prints are taken, the basic information about the
Swedish asylum procedure are handed out, the asylum seeker is registered and the
first introductory interview is made. Even after the departure of the asylum seeker to
the Reception Unit, the Center continues to be responsible for the application
procedure. Even though decision making officers and Dublin procedure officers are
also present at the Units, it is mainly at the Centers where the decision regarding an
application is taken and where the Dublin procedure is activated and carried out.
After having been registered and briefly interviewed, the asylum seekers who
are going to be accommodated by the Board of Migration are transferred to a
temporary accommodation center located in a converted hotel in the outskirts of
Malmö where they remain till the authority finds an apartment to accommodate
them. The accommodation center, therefore, is thought to host the asylum seekers
only for a few days. The facility is provided with a functioning kitchen with cooking
crew, the asylum seekers do not cook and are not required to clean their own rooms
since a three-members cleaning crew is available. The facility has no security
personnel and is run by a team of two employees.
Of particular interest for me was the practice adopted by the Swedish
Migration Board to repatriate asylum seekers to Iraq. Currently, in fact, the Swiss
Federal Office of Migration only repatriates to the northern section of Iraq, that
controlled by the autonomous Kurdish government. The repatriation unit of the
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Swedish Migration Board, on the contrary, organizes regularly flights to Erbil,
Duhok, Bassora and, since October 2008 to Baghdad. The decision making officer I
met in Malmö had just returned from a trip to Baghdad with Turkish Airlines
(Stockholm-Istanbul-Amman-Baghdad) and considered the journey a complete
success (the asylum seeker was a minor affected with polio) praising the authorities
in Iraq for their collaboration. Under the Dublin agreement, the unit also organizes
repatriation to Greece, including those under category 2 and single women.
The Reception Units
After having registered the asylum seekers, the case officers of the Reception Center
contact those of the Reception Unit to find a suitable accommodation for the asylum
seekers. When a suitable apartment is finally found, the asylum seeker travels,
generally by train, from the temporary accommodation center to the Reception
Center – in Malmö’s case to Kristianstad - where the handling officer responsible for
his/her case transports him/her to the assigned accommodation. The Board of
Migration tries to place the asylum seekers in an apartment in a normal housing area
generally located in the countryside. Single asylum seekers will need to share a room
while a family can have its own room but must expect to share an apartment with
other people. Although the Migration Board equips the apartment with furniture and
the basic necessities required in a household, those asylum seekers who desires a tv
or a stereo, must buy it with the money assigned to them by the Migration Board.
Moreover, while living in the apartment, the asylum seeker is responsible to look
after the apartment, its equipment and surroundings. The handling officers make
regular visits to the asylum seekers to inspect the property and to make sure that the
technical equipments and installations are functioning properly. The handling
officers at the Unit met regularly with the asylum seeker to investigate about the
latter’s identity documents, to help him/her to solve daily inconveniences and to
answer questions regarding the asylum seeker’s application. The handling officers
also functions as a support for the asylum seeker guiding and giving advices to
facilitate the asylum seeker’s integration in Swedish society.
The Migration Board provides assistance for those asylum seekers deprived of
financial means. The daily allowance is 71 SEK for single adults, 61 SEK for adult
sharing accommodation, 37 SEK for children up to the age of three, 43 SEK for child
aged between 4-10 years old and 50 SEK for children aged between 11-17. The
Migration Board estimates that these amounts should be sufficient to pay for food,
clothes, shoes, medical and dental care, and other consumables and leisure activities.
The daily allowance can be reduced if, for example, the asylum seeker does not cooperate with the authorities or does not come to an appointed investigation meeting.
The asylum seeker receives his financial allowance through a Maestro bank card
which, being also connected to a supermarket chain, can be used to withdraw money
as well as to shop in the supermarket.
During the introductory period, the Reception Unit also provides for all
asylum seekers – Dublin cases excluded – a free of charge Swedish language
instruction. The school I visited in Kristianstad is run by two experienced teachers.
Classes are Monday to Friday, from 10 to 12 am, and can last, in theory, till a decision
is taken. The Students are divided between those who are able to read and write
(alpha) and those who are not; the alpha classes costs the Board 299 SEK per week,
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the other 231 SEK. In the past, a prolonged absence to school was fined with a
reduction of the monthly salary but it was later decided to reverse this decision and
to consider the attendance voluntary.
The Detention centers
The Swedish Migration Board has established several secure centers of
accommodation in order to make sure that the asylum seekers remain available for
further investigation or for the expulsion procedures. Until 1997, the detention
centers were under the responsibility of the police but questions regarding the
correctness of mixing criminals and asylum seekers finally led to the take over of the
Migration Board. Even after the takeover of the Migration Board, however, the great
majority of the inmates are cases belonging to the police. Currently, the Swedish
Board of Migration maintains a total of five detention centers for a total of 185 beds.
The detention center I visited is located in the village of Örkelljunga. The center, a
former youth hostel for boys, was opened in 2004 and houses 20 asylum seekers
under the supervision of 24 officers working in team of four. The current facility is
considered temporary and the center will move to a new building in 2010 capable of
hosting at least 50 inmates. Almost all of the asylum seekers in the center have
received a negative decision to their asylum application but have refused to leave
voluntarily or are considered by the authority as at risk of disappearing before the
expulsion decision can be implemented.
According to the Swedish Alien Act, a person could be detained if further
investigation is required to fully consider his/her asylum application - in which case
the person in question cannot be detained for more than 48 hours – if his or her
identity is unclear, if it is likely that the person in question will not be able to remain
in Sweden or if a decision has been reached that the person must leave Swedish
territory – in which case the person may be detained for up to two months. The
average detention period is of 7 days for the cases belonging to the Board of
Migration and of 35 days for those belonging to the police.
Although the asylum seekers located in the facility can neither go outside nor
leave the facility, they are free to move inside the center. Every room houses a
maximum of three inmates. There are shared showers and bathrooms, washroom
and a kitchen. The food comes from outside twice a day. There is a small gym, two
computer rooms with internet connection, a TV room and a table tennis room. The
staff of the detention centers does its best to make the sojourn in the center as
pleasant as possible for the inmates and encourage them to be as active as possible
while in the center and periodically organize activities such as courses of yoga,
painting and English language. Every Tuesday the officers met with the asylum
seekers for an open discussion about complains and requests. The center has a small
internal court where the asylum seekers can breathe fresh air at least one hour every
day and provides a special room for religious practices.
The center does not maintain a special section for women but they are
generally assigned the same rooms – at the time of my visit there were no women in
the center and their rooms were occupied by men. Children and their parents can be
detained if there is a reason for doing so but neither children nor their parents may
be taken into detention if that isolates them from each other. Even though, under
exceptional circumstances, an unaccompanied child can be taken into detention, the
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Migration Board tries to find alternative solution for these cases. At the time of my
visit, there were no unaccompanied children present at the center.
While detained, the asylum seekers are allowed to receive visits and a special
section of the facility is made available for relatives, lawyers and the police. The
officers of the Red Cross and of Amnesty International are allowed to visit the entire
center.
The staff reserves the right to do a body search of the asylum seeker if they
suspect that a person is bringing something into the detention center that could harm
someone else or disturb the order inside the facility. The officers are not allowed to
search a visitor but could search the inmate after the visit. If a particular inmate is
considered a threat for his or her own life or for the rest of the inmates, the handling
officers can order his or her arrest. Even after this person is taken care of by the
police authorities, the handling officers visit him or her at least once a week.
Final remarks and conclusion
Swedish asylum policy has a long history; Sweden has always been extremely active
in giving asylum to individuals and communities under threat. Its neutrality has
allowed Sweden to overcome many ideological barriers in order to give protection
and asylum to individuals from many different countries. Every country can learn
something from the Swedish asylum policy.
Particularly interesting, from my point of view, is the difference between
Sweden’s und Switzerland’s accommodation policy. The Swedish Migration Board
keeps the asylum seekers as briefly as possible in the registration centers and sends
them to external accommodations after only a few days from their arrival in Sweden.
The Swiss Federal Office of Migration, on the contrary, seeks to keep the asylum
seeker in the registration centers as long as a decision regarding his/her application
has been taken. It is only when the decision takes more than two months to be taken
that the asylum seeker is sent to the assigned Canton.
Both procedures offer some positive aspects and some disadvantages. If, for
example, the Swiss Registration centers can, at times, be crowded, this system allows
the Migration Office to conclude the cases in a relative short time, in many cases in a
matter of weeks. By sending the asylum seeker to the countryside, the Swedish
Migration Board creates a more relaxed accommodation but, in doing so, it also
slows the decision making process down. Furthermore, by being sent to the
countryside, the asylum seeker can very easily feel isolated; if he or she can speak
neither Swedish nor English, for example, a prolonged sojourn in a small countryside
village could be very frustrating, especially if this period is followed not by a positive
decision but one of expulsion. To ask the asylum seeker to integrate in Swedish
society even when he/she is expected to receive, in the near future, a negative
decision can be seen as contradictory and generate confusion and false hopes in the
mind of the asylum seeker.
Even though the staff of the Swedish Migration Board remains constantly in
contact with the asylum seekers to support and help them to solve any
inconveniences, the asylum seekers are put in a position in which they have to help
themselves: they are provided with money to buy food but it is them who have to go
shopping and organize their daily diet, they are given the address of the nearest
pharmacy and local clinic but it is them who have to arrange an appointment with
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the physician, they are given the basic kitchen tools but if they want a TV, they have
to buy it with the allowance given to them by the Board. In other words, although the
Migration Board provides the basis, the asylum seekers must constantly activate
themselves to deal with their daily inconveniences. This system seems very indicate
to make the asylum seekers to adapt as soon as possible to Swedish society; it seems
to function as a full immersion course in “Swedish way of life”. The classes of
Swedish language offered for free by the Migration Board to the asylum seekers from
the very beginning of their permanence in Sweden, are a clear example of this policy:
to learn the local language is, in fact, one of the most important steps in the
integration process.
Today’s immigration reality, however, is rapidly changing and a system such
as that adopted by Sweden, i.e. a system built to integrate the asylum seekers as
rapidly as possible in Swedish society, could not be entirely compatible with the new
developments; as a matter of fact, this system could, in some cases, create obstacles
and delay the implementation of the new procedures. By assigning precedence and
defining responsibilities, for example, the Dublin Treaty is supposed to speed up the
asylum procedure for those applicants who have been registered by Eurodac in one
of the member countries. To send these applicants to the countryside, however, could
complicate and delay the repatriation process, especially if the notification of the
expulsion decision does not coincide with the physical expulsion of the asylum
seeker. In the same way, to send to school to learn Swedish those applicants whose
asylum application would probably be rejected, might involve a waste of energy and
resources and generate false hopes. The applicant, in fact, might think that his/her
asylum application has been accepted when this is, actually, not the case.
Regarding the detention centers, I was surprised to learn that even though the
centers are run by the Migration Board, the great majority of the inmates are cases
belonging to the police. This situation can create confusion and misunderstandings;
the problematic regarding the detention centers is, in my opinion, too delicate to be
left in this sort of limbo: the Migration Board should have full authority of all cases
under its supervision.
At the time of writing, the Swedish Migration Board is already adapting its
asylum policy to the new situation; as I write, in fact, the asylum procedure is being
shortened and opportunities are being created to direct the asylum seeker toward the
internal job market. In the near future, for example, the language course in Swedish
will be modified ad personam to respond to those asylum seekers who have a specific
professional background.
To be ready to reconsider one’s own asylum procedure is, in itself, a
demonstration of mental flexibility and human sensibility. To modify an asylum
procedure is a process that involves not only the sphere of the Migration Board but
also the social and the political ones. It is, indeed, a reconsideration of the way in
which a society looks at itself.
Without abandoning its traditional approach to the subject, the Swedish
Migration Board is already projecting itself in the future and is actively involved in
trying to respond effectively to the constantly evolving reality of the asylum issue.
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NAME
ORGANISATION
COUNTRY
HOST COUNTRY
CONTACTPERSON
HOST COUNTRY & E-MAIL
Cesare Vespignani
Federal Office of Migration
Switzerland
Sweden
Gunnel Segerfeldt, Sweden;
gunnel.segerfeldt@migrationsverket.se
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