Borders and bureaucracies of EU mobile citizenship: Polish migrants and the personal identification number in Sweden

Abstract

This article advances research into the workings and ‘workarounds’ of internal border technologies in migrants' lives. Through a focus on the specific example of tensions between EU mobile citizenship and the Swedish personal identification number, or personnummer, we enhance understandings of the bureaucratisation of state power and the enduring importance of discretion in computerised bureaucratic encounters. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Polish migrants living in Sweden, we analyse the centrality of this personnummer to our participants' working lives and general access to daily amenities and services. We reveal how and why it is so difficult to get this registration, even as EU citizens; explore how this relates to exploitative work practices; consider what happens, or cannot happen, when people are unable to obtain their personnummer and are effectively rendered undocumented; and focus on how these bureaucratic exclusions can nevertheless be managed and mediated. Ultimately we find that while this one example presents significant insights into the specificities of Swedish bordering practices – which go well beyond prevailing interests in welfare bordering – it also offers new insights into how contemporary digitised personal identification bureaucracies work in practice, and how fragile mobile EU citizenship has become.