Abstract
This article examines the subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation of Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden, highlighting their tactical responses to restrictive Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2025), including interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography, we explore how migrants with precarious statuses navigate legal ambiguity, administrative opacity and discretionary enforcement. Through informal knowledge networks, cross-border mobility and performative compliance, Uzbek migrants creatively reinterpret and circumvent institutional constraints. We advance the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and introduce ‘vernacular legal navigation’ to theorise how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field. These practices reveal tensions between formal legal frameworks and migrant agency, contributing to socio-legal and migration scholarship. By bridging strategic mobility and everyday legal consciousness, we re-theorise migrant agency as adaptive, relational and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration regimes.
Keywords
Introduction
Over the past decade, Nordic countries have witnessed increasingly restrictive migration and asylum policies, including narrowed access to legal residency, tightened enforcement mechanisms and constrained welfare entitlements for non-citizens (Hernes et al., 2023). Recent political shifts in Finland and Sweden have produced increasingly restrictive migration policies and a rise in legal liminality for non-EU migrants (Bendixsen and Näre, 2024; Eule et al., 2019). These developments have reshaped the institutional terrain in which migrants make decisions, especially those whose legal status is unstable or fragmented.
This article explores how Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden respond to these evolving governance landscapes. Focusing on individuals with precarious, irregular or secondary legal statuses, such as rejected asylum seekers, those with expired permits or migrants navigating between temporary or overlapping legal categories, we analyze the everyday tactics and informal infrastructures that migrants mobilise to endure and adapt under restrictive conditions. These infrastructures include social media platforms (e.g., Telegram groups), diasporic networks and informal intermediaries that circulate legal knowledge, job opportunities and bureaucratic advice, often compensating for the lack of formal support.
Finland and Sweden were selected because they represent two distinct legal opportunity structures for the same migrant group. While Sweden historically offered an asylum-based route – now extremely restrictive – Finland provides a labour-based pathway that is increasingly bureaucratised and fragile. Uzbeks rarely migrate to Norway or Denmark due to minimal chain-migration networks, stricter entry thresholds and the absence of well-established Uzbek migrant-community infrastructures. The two countries therefore offer analytically meaningful contrasts in how the same population navigates divergent forms of legal precarity within the Nordic region.
These developments parallel recent UK approaches, where the ‘hostile environment’ and subsequent reforms have similarly relied on welfare restrictions, administrative hurdles and enhanced documentation checks as tools of immigration control (Griffiths and Yeo, 2021). The convergence between the UK and the Nordic region indicates a broader European trend towards deterrence-oriented governance, in which legal precarity is not an unintended by-product but an active mechanism for regulating mobility.
Drawing on the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017), we examine how migrants engage in tactical, often morally ambivalent practices that circumvent or reconfigure the intended effects of migration law. Rather than viewing law as a coherent apparatus uniformly applied by the state, we adopt a socio-legal perspective that treats law as a contested, plural field of power, shaped by discretionary institutional practices and overlapping legal orders (Merry, 1988; von Benda-Beckmann et al., 2009). Within this framework, we introduce the notion of vernacular legal navigation to capture the informal, situated and culturally mediated ways migrants interpret and engage with legal norms to access rights, move across borders and secure livelihood. Building on scholarship on vernacular law and legal consciousness (Comaroff and Comaroff, 2006; Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Merry, 1988, 2005; Sarat and Kearns, 1995), we show how legality is performed and negotiated in contexts of migration control and welfare exclusion in the Global North.
Migration governance scholarship has analyzed the macro-level logic of mobility regimes; in particular it has illuminated how mobility regimes are structured by intersecting logics of securitisation, humanitarianism and bureaucratic rationality (Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Scheel, 2019; Shamir, 2005).
However, there remains limited empirical attention to how migrants in the Global North actively subvert or tactically navigate such regimes in everyday life. Much of the existing literature in this area has concentrated on Middle Eastern and African populations (e.g., De Genova, 2017; Eule et al., 2019; Khosravi, 2010), with comparatively little focus on Central Asian migrants. This neglect is notable given the specific structural positioning of Central Asians in the EU: often entering via work, study or tourism visas from Eastern European countries such as Poland, Latvia or the Czech Republic, they then move to countries such as Sweden and Finland, where regularisation is far more difficult (Eraliev, 2023). Unlike Syrian or Somali refugees who may benefit from more clearly codified protection frameworks under humanitarian conventions, Central Asian migrants frequently find themselves in ‘secondary legal statuses’ (Aru, 2022; Brekke and Brochmann, 2015; Schapendonk, 2021) – falling between categories such as temporary permit holders, rejected asylum seekers or undocumented workers. Their legal pathways are often fractured, ambiguous or exhausted: they may have exhausted their appeals for asylum, overstayed work visas or relied on dubious employers for sponsorship in economies marked by informality and precarity (Schierup and Jørgensen, 2018; Wyss, 2019).
In this context, the Nordic region – known for strong legal institutions and universalist welfare ethos (Brochmann et al., 2012) – presents a paradox. On the one hand, these institutional frameworks uphold principles of equality and inclusion; on the other, they generate high thresholds of bureaucratic compliance that affectively exclude irregular migrants from meaningful access to rights (Jørgensen and Meret, 2012; Könönen, 2018; Wahlbeck, 2019). This contradiction creates not only constraints but also specific opportunities. For example, migrants may utilise digital platforms, local networks or knowledge of bureaucratic loopholes to delay deportation or secure temporary employment. One such opportunity lies in the fragmented nature of EU migration governance: migrants often exploit jurisdictional differences between member states by ‘restarting’ asylum processes or residence permit applications across borders (Aru, 2022; Brekke and Brochmann, 2015; Schapendonk, 2021). We aim to contribute to this literature by focusing on the specific case of Uzbeks in Finland and Sweden – an understudied group whose migration trajectories are shaped by geopolitical shifts, post-Soviet legacies and the tightening of Nordic immigration regimes. Building on the concept of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017), we centre the role of ‘vernacular legal navigation’, understood as the localised, culturally embedded and improvisational ways in which migrants interpret, engage with and circumvent legal norms. While ‘vernacular law’ has a long tradition in legal anthropology (De Sousa Santos, 1987; Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Merry, 1988), our use of the term emphasises not folk legal systems per se but the hybrid, tactical and morally ambiguous engagements with state law that emerge in contexts of legal marginality.
The main research question guiding this study is: How do migrants sustain mobility and agency in legal environments explicitly designed to restrict them? To address this puzzle, in particular we ask: How do Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden respond to asylum rejection, irregularisation or liminal legal statuses? What strategies and networks do they mobilise to navigate legal constraints and institutional exclusion? What do these practices reveal about the fragility and contestability of Nordic migration governance regimes?
Analyzing these questions allows us to reframe migrants not simply as objects of governance but as legal actors who creatively adapt to, resist and reshape the systems in which they are embedded. The article builds conceptually on the notion of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) to explore how migrants tactically circumvent the constraints of migration law. However, we go further to introduce a new analytic lens: vernacular legal navigation. This concept foregrounds the everyday, culturally embedded ways in which migrants engage with, interpret and reshape legal regimes – not necessarily through open resistance but through creative improvisation, legal mimicry and informal knowledge exchange. By combining these two perspectives, the article seeks to re-theorise migrant agency under conditions of legal precarity, while also contributing to broader debates on migration governance in the Nordic and global contexts, socio-legal studies of migration and the role of law in producing and contesting borders within the Nordic migration regime.
The empirical focus on Uzbek migrants is analytically important for three reasons. First, many have prior migration experience in Russia, where they developed strategies for navigating authoritarian bureaucracy and informal economies (Eraliev and Urinboyev, 2023; Reeves, 2013; Urinboyev, 2020). This shapes their expectations and practices upon arriving in the EU, where they often face unfamiliar legal cultures and more rigid bureaucratic logics. This history shapes their expectations of legality and their strategies in European contexts, particularly in Nordic countries where rule-of-law norms and welfare bureaucracies operate very differently (Letto-Vanamo and Tamm, 2019). As such, Uzbeks bring with them a unique legal baggage (Kubal, 2013; Kurkchiyan, 2011), shaped by authoritarian states, labour migration regimes and informal institutional cultures – understood here as the unwritten norms, social expectations and informal networks that shape how laws are interpreted and applied in practice (Hendley, 2012; Ledeneva, 2006). Second, Uzbek migrants often do not neatly fit into dominant categories such as ‘refugee’, ‘labour migrant’ or ‘postcolonial subject’ and are often subject to racialised invisibility in both public discourse and research (Andersson, 2014; Fassin, 2011). This makes them a compelling case for examining how legal categories are applied, contested or bypassed in practice. Third, because many Uzbek migrants are secondary movers – people who have transited through Russia, Turkey or other EU countries before arriving in the Nordic region (Eraliev, 2023) – their trajectories offer insight into how migrants adapt to stratified and fragmented legal landscapes within and across EU member states.
The article is based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025, including interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography with Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden. By focusing on their situated experiences and everyday legal strategies, we aim to deepen current scholarly understanding of how mobility, legality and agency are enacted under legal and institutional constraints.
The article proceeds as follows. The next section situates the study within broader socio-legal studies of migration, bordering literature and migration governance scholarship. We then describe our methodological approach and fieldwork strategy. The empirical sections analyze three domains of subversive legal practice: informal legal knowledge networks, cross-border movements and legal reclassification and performative compliance with institutional demands. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for rethinking legality, migrant agency and welfare state governance in the Nordic region.
Literature Review and Conceptual Framework
Contemporary socio-legal scholarship increasingly rejects the notion of law as a fixed, coherent system applied uniformly from above. Instead, migration law is conceptualised as a contested field of governance marked by legal pluralism, discretionary enforcement and institutional fragmentation, where categories such as ‘refugee’ or ‘irregular migrant’ are unstable and politically shaped (Eule et al., 2019; Kalir and van Schendel, 2017; Dembour, 2015). This legal uncertainty requires migrants to continuously interpret and adapt to shifting legal terrains, enacting and contesting law in everyday life (Infantino, 2022). Nordic welfare states are not exempt: recent research shows how discretionary decision-making, administrative opacity and policy oscillations in Finland and Sweden contribute to legal precarity and tension between universalist ideals and restrictive environment (Abdelhady, 2025; Abdelhady et al., 2020; Andersen, 2025; Keskinen et al., 2016; Könönen, 2018; Wahlbeck, 2019). These developments raise important questions about how migrants respond to exclusionary regimes not only through legal channels but also through informal, tactical and often morally ambivalent practices.
These dynamics of legal ambiguity and institutional strain foreground the need to move beyond formalist accounts of law and instead examine how migrants actively engage with – and sometimes resist – the structures that govern their lives. To this end, we build on the concept of subversive mobilities as proposed by Cohen et al. (2017) to analyze how migrants challenge or circumvent legal constraints. Unlike overt resistance or formal protest, subversive mobility refers to tactical, often covert, practices that undermine or bypass the intended effects of mobility regimes. These include exploiting legal loopholes, mimicking bureaucratic procedures and navigating overlapping regulatory systems through informal channels (Cohen et al., 2017). Cohen et al. (2017) argue that subversive mobilities emerge in contexts where formal mobility regimes are rigid and reactive, while the actors operating within or against them, such as migrants, smugglers or legal intermediaries, are often more flexible and adaptive. Their study, though focused on smuggling and trafficking networks, offers a generative analytical framework for understanding the creative tactics of migrants in more ambiguous legal contexts, such as rejected asylum seekers or temporary status holders in Europe.
This framework usefully challenges assumptions that law is uniformly applied and coherently structured. Rather, migration law, particularly in the European context, frequently exhibits legal ambiguity, administrative discretion and institutional fragmentation (Andersson, 2014; Infantino, 2022). This framing also resonates with a broader body of literature that critiques the effects of securitisation, border externalisation and legal stratification within contemporary migration regimes (Bigo, 2002; De Genova, 2013; Glick Schiller and Salazar, 2013; Shamir, 2005).
Nevertheless, while the notion of subversive mobilities powerfully illuminates how migrants navigate and resist legal constraint, it tends to emphasise the disruptive and strategic dimensions of mobility. It offers less insight into the mundane, interpretive and socially embedded ways in which migrants understand and act upon the law in everyday life; particularly in post-entry contexts where movement may be restricted but legality must still be performed, negotiated or survived. To address this, we introduce the concept of vernacular legal navigation – a term that captures how migrants creatively engage with legal systems from within their own socio-cultural logics. Building on legal consciousness literature (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Gallagher, 2006; Nielsen, 2000) and ethnographies of informality and illegality (Gomberg-Muñoz, 2011; Khosravi, 2010; Thomas and Galemba, 2013), we argue that legal navigation is often not about resistance per se but about translation, mediation and pragmatic adaptation.
Vernacular legal navigation refers to migrants’ everyday engagements with law that are embedded in informal knowledge networks (e.g., diaspora networks, social media channels, kin relations), shaped by prior experiences (e.g., in Russia or Turkey) and often involve morally ambivalent strategies. These include partial disclosure to authorities, manipulation of bureaucratic categories or legal bricolage – assembling fragments of legal knowledge to produce viable claims. This mode of navigation is distinct from both legal compliance and overt defiance: it operates in-between, drawing on local repertoires, institutional ambiguities and tactical improvisation.
Central to our conceptual framework is the notion of legal consciousness – that is, how migrants make sense of, interpret and engage with legal systems in their everyday lives (e.g., (Chua and Engel, 2019; Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Gallagher, 2006; Silbey, 2005). Following the foundational typology by Ewick and Silbey (1998), we acknowledge that migrants may relate to the law before the law (as a distant authority), with the law (as a game to be played), against the law (as an oppressive force) or under the law (as a condition of disempowerment). Extending these typologies, Halliday and Morgan (2013) and Kubal (2023) highlight forms of dissenting legal consciousness characterised by scepticism, moral critique and selective engagement with state law. Rather than rejecting legality altogether, individuals may continue to file applications, appeals or requests while simultaneously questioning the fairness, coherence or legitimacy of legal institutions. In our material, Uzbek migrants frequently articulate this ambivalent stance: they pursue formal procedures yet rely on diasporic interpretations of legality when institutional decisions appear opaque, inconsistent or unjust.
This framework advances the literature in two ways. First, it centres migrant knowledge production as an analytical focus. Whereas subversive mobility emphasises action (how migrants move or outwit systems), vernacular legal navigation asks how migrants understand, interpret and communicate legality within their own communities. As Kox (2024) shows in the Dutch context, undocumented migrants do not merely react to legal structures but develop evolving understandings of law that inform their behaviour. Similarly, Shapiro and colleagues (2025) highlight how refugee families engage in ‘timework’ to synchronise life trajectories with institutional temporality – an everyday legal labour that aligns with our notion of vernacular navigation.
Second, it allows us to capture the plurality of legal normativities that migrants engage with. As legal pluralists have long emphasised (Griffiths, 1986; Merry, 1988), state law is only one source of normativity. Migrants often draw on multiple, sometimes contradictory, legal and moral orders: ranging from religious obligations and kinship norms to previous bureaucratic experiences in non-Western states. Vernacular legal navigation thus highlights the hybrid legal landscapes that migrants move through, as well as the epistemic practices that sustain them.
Vernacular legal navigation moves beyond binary categories of legal/illegal or compliant/resistant by highlighting situated forms of agency shaped by moral ambivalence, improvisation and vulnerability. While subversive mobilities draw attention to tactical disruptions and cross-border manoeuvres, vernacular legal navigation foregrounds post-entry survival and migration bureaucracies through which migrants negotiate rights within hostile welfare and migration bureaucracies. Together, the two concepts challenge dominant state-centric accounts of law by emphasising migrant agency and creativity under conditions of institutional opacity and asymmetry.
Bringing together subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation enables a more comprehensive account of migrant agency under legal constraint. Rather than reiterating the well-established claim that law is plural and enacted (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Merry, 1988), this dual framing foregrounds how migrants tactically inhabit the space between legal categories and institutional regimes. By tracing how migrants engage in improvised, relational and often morally ambivalent strategies to make law actionable in their lives, we re-conceptualise legality not just as a contested field but as one navigated through embodied, everyday practices. This approach aligns with recent critical institutionalist approaches that view migration governance as dispersed across multiple levels, actors and institutional logics (Scholten and Penninx, 2016). It also resonates with socio-legal scholarship that sees law as a performed and relational field rather than a top-down apparatus of control (Calavita, 2016; Eule et al., 2019). Yet our contribution lies in extending these insights to the vernacular level, where legality is mediated through informal knowledge exchange, legal mimicry and moral reasoning under conditions of legal precarity.
In the context of Nordic migration regimes – characterised by formal commitments to equality, rule of law and welfare universality – this approach reveals important tensions between institutional ideals and lived realities (Abdelhady et al., 2020; Andersen, 2025; Wahlbeck, 2019; Wahlström, 2018). Legal ambiguity, administrative delays and shifting eligibility criteria produce conditions of chronic liminality, especially for rejected asylum seekers, secondary movers or temporary status holders. Under such conditions, migrant agency takes the form of micro-practices of adaptation, improvisation and reinterpretation – practices that we argue must be understood through the lens of vernacular legal navigation.
In what follows, we build on this framework through a qualitative research design that centres the lived experiences of Uzbek migrants navigating the migration regimes of Finland and Sweden. We outline our methodological approach, including fieldwork strategy, data sources and ethical considerations, before turning to the empirical findings that illustrate how subversive and vernacular legal practices unfold in practice.
Methodology
This article draws on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025 among Uzbek migrant communities in Finland and Sweden. While fieldwork among Uzbek migrants in Sweden continued from April 2022 to December 2024, fieldwork in Finland has been ongoing since January 2024. The research design was guided by a commitment to capturing the everyday legal practices, mobility strategies and informal knowledge networks that emerge under conditions of legal precarity and institutional ambiguity. Given the article's focus on subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation, we employed a qualitative, inductive approach that privileges migrants’ own narratives, interpretations and social worlds.
Fieldwork was conducted in Helsinki (including a surrounding town of Vantaa) in Finland, and in Stockholm in Sweden, urban centres with significant Central Asian migrant populations. The sample includes Uzbek migrants with a range of legal statuses: rejected asylum seekers, temporary protection holders, secondary movers from other EU countries, undocumented residents and those transitioning between legal categories (e.g., from asylum seeker to work permit). This diversity of legal positioning allowed us to trace how legal tactics and navigational practices vary across different forms of legal vulnerability.
Participants were recruited through a combination of snowball sampling, referrals from community organisations and outreach via Telegram groups, WhatsApp channels and personal networks of the authors. The final dataset includes over 20 in-depth interviews, 5 focus groups (four in Stockholm and one in Helsinki) and over 18 months of digital ethnographic engagement.
Semi-structured interviews were conducted in Uzbek and occasionally Russian, depending on participants’ preferences. Interviews focused on legal trajectories, encounters with state institutions, access to services, border-crossings and sources of legal advice. They also probed participants’ interpretations of their rights, experiences with bureaucracies and moral reasoning around legality and compliance. Focus groups were used to explore shared strategies and collective knowledge production. They offered a space to capture how migrants discuss, reinterpret and disseminate legal information in communal settings.
Both authors’ linguistic and cultural proximity to the research population facilitated deep access to communal settings that would likely remain inaccessible to external researchers. Beyond formal interviews, we were invited into participants’ homes, workplaces, mosques and informal gatherings, and we interacted regularly through encrypted messaging apps and community-run Telegram channels. This insider positioning enabled closer observation of everyday legal interpretations and decision-making, while also requiring ongoing reflexivity regarding expectations, trust dynamics and our shifting roles as both community insiders and academic researchers.
Digital ethnography was a crucial component of the research. We systematically followed public and semi-private Telegram channels and groups, Facebook pages, used by Uzbek migrants to share migration law-related updates, job opportunities and bureaucratic tips. This enabled us to trace the circulation of vernacular legal knowledge and observe how migrants collaboratively interpret and repurpose legal information.
Data were coded thematically using an abductive approach that moved iteratively between theory and empirical material. The initial coding frame was developed by triangulating recurring themes across interviews, focus groups and digital ethnography. Domains such as bureaucratic encounters, legal-status transitions, intra-EU mobility, information-sharing and moral reasoning emerged consistently in both field sites and directly reflected our conceptual interest in subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation. These codes were refined through repeated reading of transcripts and cross-case comparison between Finnish and Swedish material.
Both authors share linguistic and cultural backgrounds with the research population, which facilitated rapport and enabled deeper engagement with culturally embedded forms of legal reasoning. At the same time, we remained reflexive about our institutional positioning as university-based researchers and the asymmetries this position entailed. We were particularly attentive to participants’ vulnerabilities given their precarious legal status, and all fieldwork followed ethical protocols for informed consent, confidentiality and data anonymisation. Where participants expressed fear of surveillance or exposure, we adapted data collection methods to ensure their safety and comfort, including the use of encrypted messaging apps and anonymous interviews.
This methodology allows us to access domains of legal practice and mobility that are often obscured in official policy accounts or state-centred research. By combining in-person and digital ethnography, and by embedding ourselves in migrant communities over an extended period, we were able to trace the nuanced, adaptive and often morally ambivalent strategies migrants use to navigate legal constraint. These methods are particularly suited to capturing subversive and vernacular legal practices that are covert, performative or contextually embedded, and therefore unlikely to surface in survey or administrative data.
Legal and Institutional Context
The migration regimes of Finland and Sweden are formally governed by the European Union's common legal framework, including the Geneva Convention, the Dublin III Regulation and subsidiary protection norms. However, their national-level implementations have diverged in significant ways, particularly in response to shifting political dynamics and the growing securitisation of migration governance. While both countries maintain outward commitments to legal due process and humanitarian protection, in practice they have adopted increasingly restrictive and discretionary approaches, especially following the 2015 ‘refugee crisis’ and the subsequent rise of right-wing populist parties.
In Finland, migration policy has become increasingly restrictive, particularly following the 2023 election, which brought the far-right Finns Party into the governing coalition. While earlier reforms after 2015 introduced temporary protection and tightened family reunification, recent developments have intensified political pressure to restrict asylum and integration frameworks, often framed in terms of national security and geopolitical tensions with Russia. In Sweden, similar trends emerged after the 2022 elections, which brought a right-wing coalition to power with support from the Sweden Democrats. As Abdelhady (2025) argues, this reflects a broader rightward shift in global migration politics, where even liberal welfare states increasingly frame migration through crisis discourse, identity politics and securitisation.
Despite formal legal safeguards, both regimes are marked by administrative opacity, policy oscillations and legal ambiguity, which contribute to a sense of unpredictability and precarity among migrants (Hagelund, 2020; Wahlström, 2018). Decision-making authority is often highly discretionary, with individual case officers playing a pivotal role in determining outcomes (Hernes et al., 2023; Wahlbeck, 2019). Delays in processing, contradictory decisions across similar cases and sudden changes in legal interpretations create conditions of structural liminality (Abdelhady et al., 2020; Eule et al., 2019; Gustafsson and Engblom, 2024).
For Uzbek migrants, the constraints of Nordic migration regimes are acutely felt but manifest differently across Finland and Sweden. In Sweden, the Uzbek population is relatively sizeable compared to other Central Asian groups, estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 individuals, with a significant number of them having an undocumented status (Eraliev, 2023; IOM, 2025). In recent years, many Uzbeks in Sweden have increasingly turned to the asylum system as a de facto pathway to legalisation. However, in 2024, for example, 96% of asylum applications submitted by Uzbek nationals were rejected – a figure that reflects the prevailing scepticism among Swedish authorities regarding protection claims from Uzbekistan, which is often considered a ‘safe’ or low-priority country of origin (Asylrättscentrum, 2025).One key legal mechanism that enabled such regularisation was the changing tracks provision (spårbyte), which allowed asylum seekers to transition into work permit applicants if they secured formal employment during the asylum process. This loophole was especially vital for Uzbeks, who often faced extremely high rejection rates but were frequently employed in low-wage or informal sectors (Eraliev, 2023). However, as of 1 April 2025, the Swedish Migration Agency officially abolished the track-change option, thereby closing off one of the few remaining routes for rejected asylum seekers to regularise their stay (Migrationsverket, 2025). This shift has deepened the precarity for many Uzbek migrants already navigating a highly restrictive asylum regime.
In contrast, Finland hosts a much smaller Uzbek population, and asylum is a far less common strategy among this group. Instead, many Uzbeks in Finland apply for legal residency through labour migration channels, particularly in sectors such as construction. At first glance, this pathway appears more predictable and structured than the asylum route. However, it is also marked by high levels of precarity. Between 2022 and 2024, nearly 30% of over 5100 work permit applications submitted by Uzbek nationals were denied by Finnish authorities (Migri, 2025). Notably, over 40% of these applications (20% of them denied) were for the extension of previously approved permits (Migri, 2025), indicating that many migrants who initially received legal status later fell into irregularity or what Menjívar (2006) terms liminal legality – a condition of legal uncertainty that is neither fully authorised nor completely undocumented. As a result, rejected applicants (30% of overall applications and 20% of extended permit applications) may remain in Finland, or other EU countries, for several months or more without the legal right to work, yet also not subject to immediate deportation. This grey zone of legal uncertainty leaves many migrants in a protracted state of exclusion, often without access to social services and at heightened risk of labour exploitation (Eraliev et al., 2026). Moreover, the segmentation between asylum and labour pathways reinforces a stratified migration regime that treats different legal categories not only as technical distinctions but also as markers of moral and political deservingness, shaping the rights and vulnerabilities attached to each status (Gustafsson and Engblom, 2024).
Across both countries, the convergence of tightened legal criteria, heightened discretion and policy volatility has created a context in which law is not simply a rule-based system but a field of negotiation and uncertainty. The institutional landscapes in both countries generate conditions of legal liminality; where migrants are neither fully excluded nor securely incorporated. Rejected asylum seekers or residence permit applicants may remain in legal limbo for years, without the right to work but also not deported, particularly when return to home country is infeasible. This legal liminality produces openings for subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation.
Empirical Findings: Everyday Legal Navigation and Subversive Tactics
Our analysis of Uzbek migrants’ lived experiences in Finland and Sweden reveals a diverse repertoire of legal and mobility practices that allow migrants to endure, navigate and sometimes subvert restrictive migration regimes. We present three interrelated domains of empirical findings: (1) informal infrastructures of legal knowledge and advice (or informal legal knowledge networks); (2) tactical mobility and legal (re)categorisation; and (3) performative compliance and legal improvisation. Across these domains, we show how subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation materialise not as dramatic ruptures but as continuous, adaptive and morally ambivalent forms of agency enacted in response to institutional opacity and legal constraint.
Informal Legal Knowledge Networks: Telegram, Word-of-Mouth and Diasporic Legalities
A central component of vernacular legal navigation among Uzbek migrants is the circulation of legal knowledge through informal and community-based channels. In both countries, but especially in Sweden where legal assistance for undocumented or rejected migrants is limited, migrants routinely turn to Telegram groups, WhatsApp channels and diasporic contacts to seek advice on how to interpret decisions, complete forms or appeal rejections. Especially diasporic Telegram groups (Finland.uz, Sweden UZimiznikilar, O’zbegim Sweden) are popular among Uzbeks. While occasionally texts appear also in Swedish, Russian and Turkish, most of communication in these groups are in Uzbek. Together with diasporic personal networks they play an important role in shaping migrants’ legal knowledge and decision-making. These platforms served not only as sites of information exchange but as spaces for collective interpretation of the law.
These informal spaces of legal meaning-making – close to what we might term vernacular legal forums – align with Kox's (2024) finding that undocumented migrants build legal understanding collectively through everyday interactions and informal advice networks where migrants co-produce understandings of legality that blend official categories with lived knowledge. For example, in a Telegram group with over 8000 Uzbek members based in Sweden, daily discussions range from asylum appeal tips to job offers that might enable a spårbyte (before its 2025 abolition), with experienced members offering ‘translations’ of Migrationsverket letters or recommending lawyers sympathetic to Central Asian cases or suggesting trade unions that work with undocumented migrant workers.
These networks constitute more than mere information-sharing: they generate epistemic solidarities through which legal ambiguity becomes navigable. As one undocumented migrant in Stockholm explained: ‘Not everyone knows exactly what the rules are… but we help each other. Someone gets lucky with a lawyer or a loophole, and we share it’.
Or, in another similar case, as a respondent put it: In Russia, we didn’t trust the law, we trusted people. Same here – if someone from the community says this lawyer helped them or this document worked, I’ll try it. It's not about what's written on Migri's website. (Dilshod, Espoo, February 2025)
In Finland, although the Uzbek population is smaller and more focused on labour migration, similar knowledge infrastructures exist, particularly around work permit renewals. A respondent in Vantaa described how word-of-mouth and ‘mentoring’ from longer-term migrants shaped their strategies for assembling the correct documentation or responding to permit denials. In both contexts, migrants relied more on trusted peers than official information sources, reflecting a widespread distrust in the clarity and accessibility of institutional guidance – a condition of what Eule et al. (2019) term ‘administrative opacity’.
While such knowledge circulation enhanced migrants’ capacity to act under constraint, it also introduced a form of vernacular normativity – where the ‘correct’ way to navigate the system was shaped by collective precedent rather than legal accuracy. Several of these practices were shaped not only by legal precarity but also by specifically Uzbek migratory and communal repertoires. Many participants had prior experience navigating opaque bureaucracies in Russia or Turkey, which fostered a pragmatic scepticism towards formal institutions and a reliance on peer-based interpretations of law. Informal networks often resembled mahalla-like dynamics, with more established migrants circulating advice, mediating conflicts and exercising informal authority. These culturally embedded forms of social organisation strongly influenced how legality was interpreted, shared and tactically mobilised in the Nordic context. In Stockholm, for example, as a migrant facilitator informed us, a widely shared belief that overstaying a tourist visa for more than 90 days automatically entitled one to apply for asylum led to a sudden increase in opportunistic applications in 2022, many of which were later rejected. Here, migrants’ legal consciousness was co-produced through informal epistemologies, rather than through institutional encounters.
Living conditions formed an important backdrop to these informal legal forums. Many participants in Sweden lived in overcrowded shared apartments in suburban areas such as Sollentuna or Rinkeby, where six to ten people often shared a two-room flat. In Finland, some migrants lived in employer-provided accommodation near construction sites or cleaning companies, while others stayed with friends or distant acquaintances upon arrival. These cramped and constantly shifting living arrangements intensified the need for reliable, community-based legal knowledge.
Several migrants described the constant tension between short-term survival and long-term aspirations. A 29-year-old man in Helsinki explained that he worked night shifts in cleaning while studying Finnish during the day in the hope of eventually obtaining a stable contract. In Stockholm, a rejected asylum seeker who moved between friends’ apartments said: ‘I want a normal life. A steady job, a place where I can stay legally without fear. That's all’. These narratives highlight how legal uncertainty shapes both daily struggles and future horizons.
Legal status differences produced clear hierarchies within the Uzbek community. Migrants with stable work permits often acted as informal authorities, controlling access to jobs and housing and mediating information for newcomers. By contrast, rejected asylum seekers and undocumented migrants relied heavily on diaspora networks for temporary accommodation or cash work. Documented migrants were often seen as more ‘resourceful’ and better connected, whereas first-time migrants or those arriving from Poland or Baltic countries with some documentation faced marked informational disadvantages. These stratifications shaped whose advice circulated, whom people trusted and which strategies were considered feasible or morally acceptable.
Tactical Mobility and Legal Re-Categorisation
A second domain of subversive practice centres on the tactical use of intra-Schengen mobility and strategic legal (re)categorisation to navigate institutional bottlenecks. Many Uzbek migrants initially enter the EU through countries such as Poland, Bulgaria, Czechia and Baltic countries, often obtaining temporary legal statuses such as work permits, student visas or residence cards (e.g., karta pobytu in Poland). These entry points offer relatively accessible pathways into the EU, leveraging more lenient immigration regimes and visa opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe.
However, over time, some migrants move onward to higher-income countries such as Finland or Sweden, often without formal transfer or legal recognition of their previous status. While their stay in the initial EU country may be legal, their presence in the Nordic region often falls into legal grey zones, lacking clear authorisation under local immigration regimes (Eraliev, 2023). Faced with limited options for formalisation, migrants often pursue new avenues for regularisation, such as seeking employer sponsorship, initiating asylum claims or applying for residence under different identity profiles.
In Stockholm, several men working informally in kebab and pizza shops described sleeping on mattresses in back rooms after closing time, paying reduced or no rent in exchange for long shifts. One Uzbek man who held a Latvian residence card explained that his employer had instructed him that, if the police or labour inspectors arrived, he should say he had ‘just come from Riga to help a friend for a few days’ and was not formally employed in Sweden. Such arrangements relied on cross-border legal statuses and carefully scripted narratives to maintain a fragile semblance of legality while circumventing Swedish work and residence regulations.
In another illustrative case, a 32-year-old Uzbek man who had been living in Poland on a temporary residence permit decided to move to Sweden based on advice from a fellow villager, hoping to find better economic opportunities. Without legal authorisation to work in Sweden, he found informal employment in a pizzeria where he was paid in cash. While working, he also gathered information on the asylum system and sought advice from peers on how to initiate an application in order to regularise his stay. Although his asylum claim was ultimately rejected, this case demonstrates how migrants draw on fragmented EU legal structures to seek re-entry into formal systems through alternative national contexts.
Another migrant who had previously worked in Turkey explained: In Istanbul, everything was possible if you had the right contact or enough money. Here it's not about bribes, but about finding the right legal loophole. Sweden has more rules, but it also has more cracks in the system if you look closely. (Siroj, Stockholm, September 2024)
Ultimately, while the porousness of EU internal borders facilitates these movements and temporary legal strategies, long-term regularisation in countries such as Finland and Sweden remains elusive for many. These subversive mobilities underscore both the agency of migrants and the structural constraints embedded in fragmented EU migration governance.
Performative Compliance and Legal Improvisation
A further, third, domain of subversive practice among Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden involves what we call performative compliance and legal improvisation – tactical engagements with migration regimes where migrants simulate adherence to legal norms while navigating exclusionary constraints. These strategies illustrate the theoretical insights of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and our concept of vernacular legal navigation, where migrants creatively respond to restrictive and opaque legal systems by adopting behaviours and tactics that mimic formal compliance. Rather than resisting the law outright, migrants often comply just enough to avoid sanctions while simultaneously manoeuvring within its grey zones.
In Finland, these dynamics became particularly visible in the construction sector, where many Uzbek migrants sought to formalise their presence through work-based residence permits. However, faced with rigid bureaucratic hurdles, some migrants submitted forged vocational certificates from an Uzbek vocational institute that had in fact been closed for over 25 years. The Finnish Immigration Service (Migri) uncovered nearly 400 cases of document forgery, leading to 140 deportation orders and 240 residence permit denials specifically targeting Uzbek construction workers (Yle, 2019). While these fabrications may be construed as fraudulent, they also reflect a strategic engagement with an inflexible system that offers few viable pathways to legal status. As one migrant explained: I knew the document wasn’t real, but that's what everyone was doing; without it, there's no way to even get into the system. It's not that I wanted to cheat, but the rules make it impossible otherwise. (Hasan, Helsinki, March 2024) In Russia, you just paid someone to get a fake registration. Here, you have to play the legal game – say the right words, bring the right documents. It's more stressful but also more hopeful. At least here, there's a chance they’ll listen. (Jamol, Vantaa, October 2024)
In Sweden, these strategies are even more apparent within the asylum system. Migrant facilitators – often members of diaspora networks or intermediaries – train asylum seekers on how to present themselves during interviews to the Swedish Migration Agency. This includes guidance on appearance, emotional expression and the crafting of personal narratives that alight with the recognised patterns of persecution that authorities deem credible. Facilitators help migrants adapt or selectively embellish their life stories to meet the evidentiary thresholds required for asylum claims. As one facilitator explained in an interview in Stockholm: I usually tell them what kind of stories work better. If their case is weak, I help them structure it. Sometimes they have real fear but don’t know how to explain it. I tell them what details to highlight, how to answer tricky questions, and how to look serious. This is not lying – it's survival. (Farhod, Stockholm, May 2024) When people come to me for help with their asylum application, I suggest different approaches depending on their personal circumstances. It could be political persecution, or for some, claiming protection as a sexual minority, though this is highly taboo in Uzbekistan. We don’t invent things from scratch, but if there is any basis, I help them build a compelling case. I advise them on what examples of harassment to include, when to show emotion, even when it's effective to cry during the interview. These small cues can make their story more persuasive. (Mansur, Stockholm, September 2023)
Collectively, these strategies of performative compliance and legal improvisation reveal the complex, negotiated processes through which migrants engage with European migration regimes. Rather than passive subjects of control, migrants are active legal agents, continually adapting their strategies within fragmented, discretionary and securitised systems of governance. Thus, performative compliance and legal improvisation serve as critical survival strategies for migrants seeking to regularise their status in hostile legal environments. They reveal how legality is not merely a static condition but an enacted and negotiated process, shaped by the interplay between migrant agency, institutional opacity and the structural contradictions within European migration regimes (Eule et al., 2019; Infantino, 2022).
These findings reveal that Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden are not merely passive victims of legal exclusion but active navigators of a fragmented and discretionary legal landscape. Through informal knowledge-sharing, strategic mobility and performative adaptation, they engage in subversive mobilities that challenge the coherence and control of migration law. These practices are morally ambivalent, often precarious and at times legally risky – but they also constitute a form of legal and spatial agency that cannot be ignored in analyses of migration governance.
Conclusion
This article has explored how Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden engage in subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation to endure, adapt to and contest restrictive migration regimes. By focusing on the everyday tactics, informal networks and performative strategies employed by Uzbek migrants, we have demonstrated how migrant agency persists and adapts within legal environments designed to constrain mobility and enforce exclusion. Rather than reiterating the normative binaries of legality versus illegality, our findings align with broader scholarship that views migrant adaptation as a negotiated and context-dependent process (Coutin, 2000; De Genova, 2013). The concepts of subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) and vernacular legal navigation offer a dual framework for understanding how migrants reinterpret, circumvent and reshape legal constraints to sustain their mobility and livelihoods. In doing so, the article contributes to ongoing debates in migration studies, legal anthropology and socio-legal scholarship on how illegality is produced, inhabited and contested in everyday life.
The empirical findings highlight three key domains of migrant agency: informal legal knowledge networks, tactical mobility and legal re-categorisation as well as performative compliance and legal improvisation. First, informal knowledge networks, such as Telegram groups and diasporic connections, serve as critical infrastructures for circulating legal advice and collective sense-making. These networks enable Uzbek migrants to interpret opaque bureaucratic processes, share strategies for navigating rejections and co-produce vernacular understandings of legality that blend official rules with lived experiences, aligns with scholarship on legal consciousness (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Kox, 2024).
Second, tactical mobility and legal re-categorisation reveal how Uzbek migrants exploit the fragmented nature of EU migration governance, moving across Schengen borders and repurposing legal statuses from other EU countries to access new pathways to regularisation. These subversive mobilities (Cohen et al., 2017) expose both opportunities and risks inherent in overlapping European legal frameworks.
Third, performative compliance and legal improvisation highlight how migrants respond pragmatically to discretionary environments through strategic mimicry, narrative adaptation and document practices. Whether submitting forged documents in Finland or crafting asylum narratives in Sweden, migrants demonstrate an acute awareness of the performative demands of bureaucratic systems. By aligning their stories and documentation with institutional expectations, migrants navigate the moral economy of credibility where coherence and affect often matter as much as factual accuracy (Gallagher, 2006).
These findings contribute to broader debates in socio-legal studies, migration governance and critical border studies. By centering Uzbek migrants – a group often overlooked in migration scholarship due to their racialised invisibility and ambiguous legal positioning – we reveal how Central Asian migrants bring unique legal and cultural repertoires to their encounters with Nordic migration regimes. Their prior experiences in authoritarian contexts like Russia shape their expectations and strategies, enabling them to adapt to the rigid bureaucratic logics of Finland and Sweden in ways that differ from other migrant groups. This underscores the importance of examining migration through a transnational lens, where prior mobility experiences inform present practices.
Moreover, the study highlights the inherent vulnerabilities and contradictions within Nordic migration regimes. Despite their reputation for institutional rationality and welfare universalism, Finland and Sweden exhibit significant legal ambiguity, administrative opacity and discretionary enforcement. The abolition of Sweden's track-change provision in 2025 and the high rejection rates of Uzbek asylum and work permit applications in both countries exemplify how policy shifts deepen precarity and liminality for migrants. Yet, these same conditions create openings for subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation, as migrants exploit gaps and inconsistencies to assert agency. This dialectic between control and resistance reveals the fragility of migration governance, where state efforts to regulate mobility are continually undermined by migrants’ adaptive strategies.
Theoretically, the introduction of vernacular legal navigation enriches the concept of subversive mobilities by emphasising the everyday, culturally embedded ways in which migrants interpret and engage with law. Unlike subversive mobilities, which focus on tactical disruption, vernacular legal navigation captures the mundane, interpretive and socially mediated practices through which migrants make sense of legal systems. This framework bridges legal consciousness literature (Ewick and Silbey, 1998) with migration studies, offering a nuanced account of how migrants navigate legal precarity through improvisation, translation and collective knowledge production. It also highlights the plurality of legal normativities – state law, kinship obligations and diasporic norms – that shape migrant practices, aligning with legal pluralist perspectives (Griffiths, 1986; Merry, 1988).
These insights have significant implications for rethinking legality, borders and state governance in the Nordic context. By framing migrants as active legal actors rather than passive subjects, this study challenges normative assumptions about compliance and illegality. It also calls for further research into how diverse migrant groups navigate legal regimes, particularly those whose trajectories and identities fall outside dominant categories such as ‘refugee’ or ‘labour migrant’.
Taken together, these dynamics invite a rethinking of legality not as a fixed institutional framework but as a negotiated, multi-layered field in which migrants exercise situated forms of agency. The practices of vernacular legal navigation documented here show that migrants do not simply respond to governance logics but actively reshape the operational meaning of legality through collective interpretation, tactical mobility and everyday improvisation. These findings also illuminate how Nordic welfare states increasingly govern mobility through administrative ambiguity and conditional access, producing a form of welfare bordering that shifts interpretative burdens onto migrants themselves. Recognising these dynamics refines socio-legal understandings of how agency and governance co-evolve under conditions of bureaucratic uncertainty.
In conclusion, the subversive mobilities and vernacular legal navigation of Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden reveal the resilience and creativity of migrant agency under constraint. These practices expose the limits of state control and the incoherencies of migration governance, while also highlighting the moral and practical dilemmas migrants face in navigating hostile legal landscapes. By foregrounding the lived experiences of a marginalised migrant group, this study contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how legality, mobility and agency are co-constituted in the everyday lives of migrants. It invites scholars and policymakers to move beyond binary framings of legal/illegal or compliant/resistant, and to engage with the complex, plural and adaptive ways in which migrants shape the legal and social worlds they inhabit.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article was funded by several funding agencies: EU Horizon MSCA Staff Exchanges project “Non-Western Migration Regimes in a Global Perspective” (Grant No. 101130177), the Kone Foundation project “Post-Soviet Immigration and Finnish Policy Responses after the Russian Invasion of Ukraine” (Grant No. 202303258), Committee of Science of the Ministry of Science and Higher Education of the Republic of Kazakhstan (Grant No. AP23485959), and FORTE–Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Grant No. 2021-00023).
