The polit­ic­al tra­ject­ory of health­care access for un­doc­u­mented mi­grants in Sweden

De­vel­op­ment sum­mary

Andrea Spehar, Karin Åberg, Mayssa Rekhis, Lena Gross, Lisen Del­len­borg and Josephine T. V. Green­brook ex­am­ine how access to health­care for un­doc­u­mented mi­grants in Sweden has been shaped by mi­gra­tion con­trol, human rights, public health and wel­fare policy. The study chal­lenges the as­sump­tion that uni­ver­sal wel­fare sys­tems auto­mat­ic­ally pro­duce solid­ar­ist­ic mi­gra­tion policies and traces how health­care access has been con­sti­tuted, con­tested and re­con­figured over time.

Lon­git­ud­in­al policy ana­lys­is and crit­ic­al fram­ing ana­lys­is identi­fy four turn­ing points in le­gis­lat­ive de­bates and policy out­puts over more than three dec­ades. The find­ings show that policy out­comes were shaped less by uni­ver­sal welfare-state design than by shift­ing polit­ic­al align­ments: in­clus­ive out­comes emerged when hu­man­it­ari­an, public-health and legal frames aligned, while re­strict­ive out­comes gained ground when de­serving­ness and con­trol ar­gu­ments con­verged with fiscal and ca­pa­city con­cerns. The study also re­com­mends sep­ar­at­ing health­care from border en­force­ment and in­teg­rat­ing clin­ic­al ex­pert­ise into poli­cy­mak­ing.