‘It’s Hard Work Making Friends’: Transnational Mobility and Friendships Among Young European Migrants in Sweden

Abstract

Research on friendship does not fully acknowledge the multi-sited character and ‘hard work’ involved in maintaining old and making new friends. This article addresses this gap, drawing on repeated interviews with and visual data for 18 young people from Poland and Romania living in Sweden. It shows that their friendships are transnationally embedded, enduring tensions and disruptions. Few participants could preserve old friendships ‘back home’, but some sought new friends there through social media. New friendships were developed in different spaces, with a sense of shared experience and perceived similarity determining whether friends were created through co- or inter-ethnic ties. Retrospectively, young migrants valued the help of ‘ice-breaking friends’, helping the participants dare to befriend new people. In the long run, inter-ethnic friendships prevailed, but in most cases, best friends were still among co-ethnics in Sweden or in their country of birth.

Introduction

I knew about my family’s move to Sweden for about a year, but my parents told me not to talk about it with my friends. There would be a huge [fuss]. Still, I told to my best friend about my leaving. [In this way] we had a year when we did a lot of things together, thinking that this was our last year side by side.

In this quotation, Monica, 23 years old, remembers the time before leaving her best friend in Poland, at the age of 11. Together with many other young people of her generation, she followed her family to another EU state, the mobility conferred as a right on the new European Union (EU) citizens from Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) since the EU’s 2004 enlargement. Monica’s words are filled with both a sense of loss and an appreciation of her best friend, with whom she wanted to share all the time they had left together. The centrality of friendship in Monica’s and other participants’ lives is echoed in research, which argues that, especially during adolescence to the late teens, friendships ‘are ranked among the things that matter most’ (Hartup & Stevens, 1997, p. 355).

Friendship has no simple definition, but ‘comes in many different forms and provides different functions’ (Pahl & Spencer, 2010, p. 199). Researchers agree that friendship relationships are dynamic and shifting along the life course (Davies, 2019), so losing old and acquiring new friends is an ordinary experience. A particular challenge for Monica and other young people during the move is their struggle to both make and maintain new friendships while undergoing ‘the upheavals linked to transitions-to-adulthood’ (Buler & Pustulka, 2021, p. 135) and continuing to sustain strong relationships back home (Jamieson & Highet, 2013). Due to mobility at a young age, the participants’ relationships became embedded transnationally, even though their involvement in transnational practices could not be taken for granted. Following Morosanu (2013), Sime (2018), Young (2020) and others, we argue that young migrants’ transnationalism entails tensions and fragmentation, beyond often taken-for-granted connectivity and dual involvement.

The novelty of this article is its focus on the multi-sited character of migrant youths’ friendships and their efforts to maintain old and create new friendships ‘here’ and ‘there’. More specifically, the article examines how transnational mobility in the formative stages of young people’s lives shapes the making and remaking of friendships, namely: (a) How do young CEE-born young migrants experience leaving, maintaining and losing friendships in their country of birth? (b) How and in what transnational and local social spaces do young people develop new friendships post-migration, and to what extent are these formed within inter- or co-ethnicities?

Previous Research on Young People’s Friendships

Much sociological research on friendship has focused on adults’ ties, for instance, during retirement, divorce or widowhood (Davies, 2019). The seminal works by Pahl and Spencer (2004, 2010) and Spencer and Pahl (2006) sparked renewed discussion of the importance of friendship as an essential part of individuals’ personal lives and well-being. Importantly, as Allan and Adams (2006, p. 14) argued, friendship ‘is not solely the result of individual agency but also depends on the structural circumstances under which people live out their lives’, with ethnicity, gender and class being central to how friendships work. Relatively recently, researchers began to pay attention to how children and young people practice and manage their intimate relationships with others (Bagwell & Schmidt, 2011).

What has attained prominence in recent years is research on migrant children’s and young people’s friendship-making in conditions of cultural diversity, often conducted in the school setting (Fangen, 2010; Harris, 2016; Hoare, 2019; Iqbal et al., 2017). When youth friendships are studied in the Swedish context, the focus is above all on peer relationships among so-called native youth and their peers of migrant background (Bergnehr et al., 2020; Björnberg, 2011; Lundström, 2020; Tajic & Lund, 2022; Wiltgren, 2020). These studies observe that young people of migrant background have more difficulties creating friends than do their peers born in Sweden. For the newly arrived, this is partly due to their placement in separate introductory classes in the Swedish school system, with their lack of resources and language skills in Swedish impeding their socializing with peers (Björnberg, 2011). As Wiltgren (2020, p. 14) pointed out, striving for diversity in the Swedish education system is ‘by no means a guarantee of social inclusion’. Instead, young migrants experience ‘subtle exclusion’ (Wiltgren, 2020, p. 14) in school every day and try to develop individual strategies to address it. Sometimes these strategies are supported by teachers, who help young migrants to develop their relationships with peers (Tajic & Lund, 2022). According to Fangen (2010), children of migrant background born in Nordic societies can be exposed to the processes of social exclusion, stigmatization and othering outside educational settings, including on the labour market and in spatial dimensions.

Few studies so far have specifically paid attention to youths’ peer and friendship relations in the context of mobility in the EU, where, due to geographical proximity and frequent visits, friendships are developed transnationally. Some exceptions include research in the United Kingdom (Morosanu, 2013; Sime, 2018; Sime & Fox, 2015; Young, 2020), Norway (Slany & Strzemecka, 2016), Finland (Lulle & Siim, 2018) and Poland (Buler & Pustulka, 2021). Adding empirical data from Sweden to this important body of research, this article breaks new ground by focusing on friendship-making among young European migrants as a process of constructing meaningful relationships post-migration in both physical and digital ‘places’, creating safe spaces for adapting to new situations in life.

Friendships ‘Here’ and ‘There’: Theoretical Lenses for Understanding Young People’s Intimate Ties

To begin with, we anchor our definition of friendship in the sociological tradition, viewing friendships as ‘people’s significant personal relationships [including] bonds which give both structure and meaning to their lives’ (Spencer & Pahl, 2006, p. 45). Following Jamieson (2008), sociality within friendships, like within families or couple relations, is seen as based on trust, emotional attachments as well as caring and sharing activities. Sociologists tend to conceptualize friendships as being chosen and informal relationships among equals, while family and kin ties are regarded as given and legally sanctioned relationships. However, in practice, both types of relations act alongside as mechanisms of socialization (Buler & Pustulka, 2021).

Importantly, the meanings and practices of friendship vary depending on the context. Following Zhu (2020), childhood, and by extension youth, is an important context shaping how friendships are experienced. Youth friendships, like adult friendships, are structured along social characteristics such as class, gender, ethnicity, education and economic resources (Davies, 2019). Analytically interesting are the transnational embeddedness of friendships and the agency of migrant youths (Haikkola, 2011), for whom mobility and post-migration adaptations in Sweden are important structural conditions, shaping and transforming their friendships over time. At a young age, developing and maintaining friendships is hard work. As Bagwell and Schmidt (2011, p. 309) argued, ‘the individuals change and develop over time as does the relationship itself’. Being embedded transnationally, engagement with friends ‘here’ and ‘there’ can furthermore be imbued with practical complications. These include the resources to be mobile, time to spend with friends in both locations, the emotional challenges of transnational identity and, not least, the gradual loss of their home language (Morosanu, 2013; Young, 2020).

On moving to a new country, young people must learn to communicate in new relational circumstances. In culturally diverse societies such as Sweden, friendships tend to intersect across different social characteristics, when friends are sought or introduced to each other according to the principle of sameness, indicating that friends having similar experiences can understand each other better (Sime & Fox, 2015). The idea that individuals tend ‘to form friendships with similar others is referred to as “homophily”’(Hoare, 2019, p. 205). For migrant youth, friendship homophily can be based on sharing the same mother tongue or having the same religious affiliation. As Hoare maintains, in multicultural societies, ethnic homophily is central to friendship ties, ‘as a safe space for validation of identity’ (2019, p. 210). In our analysis, we apply Wiltgren’s (2017, pp. 339–340) definition of ethnicity as a notion ‘created in encounters with others by highlighting differences … negotiable and changeable’. This means that ethnicity is not a ‘thing’ that people are born with, but rather ‘a self-image as well as an ascribed identity’ (Wiltgren, 2017, p. 334) that, depending on the power hierarchies in a society, can determine whether a young person can be chosen as a friend or othered.

Notably, schools and colleges constitute a specific social context for friendship-making. Several studies have demonstrated that friendships in school are performed according to a particular cultural script, taking place in a specific space and time, constantly validated by ‘the audience’ and guided by friendship ideals that ‘can be used both to include and exclude others’ (Lundström, 2020, p. 223). A paradox created in the school environment is, as Iqbal et al. (2017, p. 130) observed, that schools have the capacity to ‘bring together’ and assemble ‘often diverse local populations’, and in this way, they represent the social sites for the ‘compulsory encounter of difference’. However, this does not mean that children and young people can freely choose whom to be friend with in school. Likewise, in Swedish schools, despite a strong tendency to promote both ‘sameness’ and ‘tolerance of difference’, young people of immigrant background, as mentioned above, feel that they are ‘politely excluded’ (Wiltgren, 2020). To mitigate this, parents as well as teachers can encourage co-ethnic everyday socialization (Bergnehr et al., 2020; Iqbal et al., 2017; Sime & Fox, 2015), in the belief that sharing the same ethnic markers can facilitate young people’s joint adaptation to a new culture. Importantly, as Bergnehr et al. (2020, p. 11) have underlined, a sense of similarity is ‘subjectively experienced’. Thus, ‘perceived similarity’ can in fact unite young people across ethnic and social backgrounds, because they share other common experiences, as illustrated below.

On an interpersonal level, it is important to acknowledge that friendship still ‘tends to be valorized as a supportive, mutually beneficial relationship’ (Smart et al., 2012, p. 92). We do not dispute this basic premise, although for our analysis, we find it useful to include difficult or toxic friendships as well (Davies, 2019; Jamieson, 2008). Difficult friendships are usually imbued with conflict, and they can potentially develop into mutual and solidaric relationships or can dissolve. When paying attention to these less-rewarding relationships, it is important to show that, while central to young people’s self-formation, difficult friendships may be valued for prompting people ‘to become very reflexive about the kind of person they are’ (Smart et al., 2012, p. 102) or are striving to become.

This chimes with the notion of friendships as key ‘biographical anchors’ (Spencer & Pahl, 2006, p. 56), ensuring an enduring sense of identity, a mirror on who we are; thus, not having or losing friends can be a marker of failure or of weakness in a young person’s own personality. Geographical mobility per se has a transformative effect on young migrants’ sense of selfhood, because ‘experiences of mobile subjects become a process of self-searching, self-reflection, transition and transformation’ (Christou, 2011, p. 253).

Methodology

This article presents results of a broader research project on transnational childhoods, exploring the experiences of redefining and creating significant social relationships by CEE-born young people who initially were left in their country of birth and moved to Sweden under the age of 18 years (Melander & Shmulyar Gréen, 2023; Shmulyar Gréen et al., 2021; Shmulyar Gréen et al., 2022). The project was granted ethical approval by the Swedish Ethical Review Authority (Reg. No. 2019–02504). In the research project, we met 18 participants, 11 female and 7 male young people, born in Poland (n = 12) and Romania (n = 6). We interviewed most of them twice, and some either once or three times, between May 2019 and April 2021.

The interviewees were recruited through mother-tongue language courses, Polish and Romanian churches, gatekeepers in the Polish and Romanian communities, and some snowballing. In response to critical discussion of the value of ‘child-centered’ and ‘participatory methods’ (Davidson, 2017, p. 229), priority was given to allocating enough time to explain what this research was about and allowing young people to decide how (if at all) they would like to participate. Participant selection followed the principle of the voluntary sharing of experiences for research purposes. A combination of qualitative interviews and visual materials, such as lifelines, network maps and drawings or photographs (Shmulyar Gréen et al., 2022) produced by the participants, proved valuable to this end. Importantly, the visual material was both a starting point in constructing the young people’s personal narratives and a facilitator of deeper conversations about specific events or people identified by the participants.

A common pattern was that young people, together with their mothers and, in several cases, their younger siblings, joined their fathers, who came to work in the country after Poland’s and Romania’s accession to the EU. At the time of the interviews, their ages ranged from 16 to 29 years, so most of the interviews were retrospective accounts, although grounded in current important events in their lives. Some participants were enrolled in high school, while others were studying at university or working.

In this article, we analyse 18 lifelines and network maps contextualized through 37 young people’s narratives (conducted in Swedish, transcribed verbatim and pseudonymized) about mobility and rebuilding significant relationships after moving to Sweden. During the interviews, friendship ties emerged as among the most central concerns that the young participants wanted to talk about. Among important events in their lives, ‘leaving friends’, ‘finding a new friend’ and ‘feeling excluded by peers’ came up frequently in the lifeline material. Likewise, in the network maps, divided into three sections, the section on friends and romantic relations at times exceeded other important relationships. Following Bagwell and Schmidt (2011), we asked the young people about what particular persons, marked as among their friends, meant to them, how long they had known one another, what they liked doing together and especially what kind of support they gave or received from one another.

To analyse these rich data, we familiarized ourselves with all three sources of material, immersing ourselves in reading and comparing the interview stories, writing notes about each interview. Using NVivo software to organize and classify the data, specific thematic codes, such as friendships, were refined into sub-codes, for instance, friendship with peers, friends in school or romantic friendships. More theoretically inspired coding revealed that friendships ‘are embedded in other relational contexts’ (Bellotti, 2016, p. 15), such as family, kin, schooling and religious communities. Here, only a few of these contexts can be presented in depth.

Findings

The findings are organized into two sections focusing on processes of friendship-(re)making locally and transnationally. We begin by examining young people’s experiences of leaving, maintaining and losing friends back home as a result of mobility to Sweden. This is followed by analysing various sites, physical and virtual, for creating new friendships post-migration and the degree to which these new relationships are built around the inter- or co-ethnic ties.

Leaving, Maintaining and Losing Friendships in the Country of Birth

Family migration, as one of the extraordinary changes in young people’s family lives, creates a sense of ‘more or less troubling loss’ (Jamieson & Highet, 2013, p. 145), including a loss of friendships and significant others back in the country of origin. Sara (age 18), who came to Sweden from Romania at age 14, had lived in anticipation of moving abroad for a long time. As a young child, she had moved a lot, and some of these moves were accompanied by changing schools and feeling insecure about whether she would be able to stay in touch with friends. The impact of multiple ruptures during her childhood was still unsettling for Sara many years afterwards, and she marked them on the negative scale of her lifeline. Neither did her own migration to Sweden feel positive, despite her missing and longing to be with her mother and older brother:

[When I moved] I had to start from zero [again]. I did not even speak the language. Like my brother, I did not have any friends here. … I was old enough to understand. But it does not matter how old you are, you feel sad anyway because you have to start from zero. … I was afraid for what would happen to me because I could not speak [Swedish], I was afraid that I would be left alone and wouldn’t have any friends.

The feelings of sadness and anxiety accompanying Sara’s move to Sweden are echoed in other narratives. They express the strain of ‘the emotional labour involved in making a new start’ (Sime, 2018, p. 38). ‘Starting from zero’, as Sara put it, implies a physical separation from people she felt strongly attached to, places where she felt rooted and, above all, losing control of what her life would be in a new country, lacking friends and knowledge of the local language.

Participants who had favoured moving to Sweden expressed ‘a sense of curiosity’ about what migration could bring. Faustyna Maj (23), born in Poland, was one of them. When asked about how she felt about moving, she said:

I was very happy indeed. … I might have been quite unaware of what was awaiting us, but I had no worries. … I was curious and always dreamt about moving away somewhere … . I was longing for something new. There was always a hope that things could get better. … I did not have the slightest idea how difficult it would be.

Although Sara and Faustyna Maj had different preferences regarding their families’ move abroad, separation from friends and leaving what used to be home in adolescence seemed to be troubling for both (Sime, 2018).

The advent of mobile technologies has had a profound impact on how people enrich existing friendships and keep contact with friends across great distances (Buler & Pustulka, 2021; Davies, 2019). There are indeed several examples in our material confirming the importance of technology and social media platforms for making new friendships transnationally. However, one key observation we made is that for old friendships to last a long time, ‘face-to-face sociality’ (Morosanu, 2013, p. 360) in specific locations (Buler & Pustulka, 2021) remains essential for creating intimacy and inclusion among friends. Longer visits to the home countries, in the summer or for the major holidays of Christmas and Easter, were mentioned as special occasions for enhanced sociability with old friends in the country of birth.

Summer vacations were mentioned as a special time to meet with friends (Lulle & Siim, 2018). Märta (age 17) talked warmly about meeting her previous teacher and classmates in Poland. After living in Sweden for 7 years, she kept contact with some classmates from school:

[When I visit Poland in the summer] we meet very often because they live nearby in the village. We have known each other for a pretty long time, so it is great fun. We usually go cycling to a forest near my house. … It is so beautiful to see how everything grows. Sunsets are especially lovely. One of my friends has a very good camera so we take lots of pictures. It became our tradition, every time we meet during the summer, we take a picture.

Another participant from Poland, Vera (age 18), moved when she was about 6 years old, and her ‘best’ friend still lives there:

My best friend lives in Poland, in the same village as my grandmother. … We have known each other for 14 years and meet mainly during summer vacations. She is the only friend I have known for such a long time. … She is a good friend, even though we fell out [i.e., briefly] with each other a year ago. If I need something I can always ask her, I can always trust her even though she does not know everything about my [current] life because we do not meet, like, once a week.

Märta’s and Vera’s stories illustrate that, by visiting friends in the summer, they could rely on a sense of having known each other for a long time, maintaining intimacy and ongoing presence, despite being physically absent from each other’s everyday lives (Haikkola, 2011). As noted by Buler and Pustulka (2021, p. 150), to have been ‘let back in[to]’ the ongoing friendships without day-to-day contact, Märta and Vera must have been perceived ‘as loyal, trust worthy soulmates with whom emotional past was shared’.

Vera’s story also illustrates how living at a distance may create tensions and challenges in friendship ties. During the interview, she mentioned several periods of silence and frustration between her and her best friend following their occasional break-ups. As Bagwell and Schmidt (2013) explained, the stability of friendship comes partly from friends ‘knowing each other for such a long time’. However, occasional break-ups and conflicts constituted an important process of learning to know each other as well as themselves. Describing this troubling side of friendship, Smart et al. (2012, p. 102) emphasized that ‘a problematic encounter with a friend reveals the critical power of friendship and the multi-layered emotions and self-investments involved in such relationships’. Emotional intensity leading to friends falling apart is quite common in friendships at a young age (Spencer & Pahl, 2006). However, Vera and her friend managed to resolve their conflicts because their friendship was grounded in a wider personal community, including parents and other kin, who cared about them and their relationship.

Other participants described how distance, physical separation and time spent away from friends made their ‘“dual” social lives’ (Morosanu, 2013, p. 359) fragmented and challenging for their social identity and sense of belonging. Monica described how, after many years of living in Sweden, she still felt strong attachment to some relatives back in Poland, all marked as important in her network map. Regarding friends, the longer she had lived abroad, the more they lost touch with each other. Monica followed some of her ‘best friends’ from childhood on Facebook, for insight ‘into how others are doing … and a reference point for self-definition’ (Buler & Pustulka, 2021, p. 151), but they had little in common to talk about when they met in person. Despite regular visits to her hometown, she felt a gradual detachment from her old friends and a loss of a sense of who she was:

[During the first 3–4 years,] we visited Poland two or three times per year, now more seldom. When I came to Poland to visit, I realized I was not the same person. It felt, wow, I no longer belong here, and at the same time it does not feel 100% in Sweden either. It is like, wow, where do I actually belong?

Monica continued to explain that even though she and her friends had initially kept frequent contact via Skype, ‘too many things’ had happened in her everyday life in Sweden. She admitted: ‘It was too tough to continue talking to them. It was almost painful to keep in touch with that part of my life or that part of myself’. Consistent with the findings of Morosanu (2013) and Buler and Pustulka (2021), Monica’s story illustrates that long-lasting transnational friendship ties, even those assisted by technology, cannot be taken for granted. Dual engagements fade away with time, when friends lose a sense of co-presence and the practicalities of their everyday lives in the host country demand young migrants’ full attention.

Migratory experience per se, as well as growing up and creating new attachments in a new country, leads to processes of ‘self-dialogue’ (Christou, 2011, p. 253), encoded with reflections on the sense of self and the meaning of friendship relations. Bogdan (age 17) from Romania was one of the few who could not create intimate friendships in his country of birth, because since childhood his parents had worked and lived in several countries before settling in Sweden. Looking back at his childhood and peers in Romania, he reflected:

When I was little, nobody wanted to hang out with me. … I did have some mates … and now I have better contact with some of them who did not want to hang out with me when I was younger. We all changed a lot. … It is a little sad to say that, but I did not miss anyone [when I left]. Not then. When I came to visit after some time, I realized that they are good mates. … I noticed that we had all changed and become better friends.

Bogdan’s regret at ‘not missing friends from his childhood’ is imbued with self-awareness. Having matured, he realized that making good friends ‘requires effort and work’ (Davies, 2019, p. 71), also on oneself, which he thinks he failed at as a child, being less sociable and having ‘an annoying’ personality. At the same time, he spoke of the fluidity and developmental potential of friendship, which can be re-established when the context in which it was created changes (Spencer & Pahl, 2006).

Developing New Friendships: Different Spaces for Building Co- and Inter-ethnic Friendships Post-migration

Most participants (14 of 18) arrived in Sweden in their early or late adolescence, which, as Bagwell and Schmidt (2011, p. 117) noted, is itself ‘a remarkable period of life with dramatic and complex changes taking place’ in any young individual. While coming to terms with these complex age-related changes, the participants were learning a new language and getting acquainted with a new school system and society. Above all, they had to deal with a sense of the ‘“strangeness” of being a family unit again’ (Sime & Fox, 2015, p. 303), learning to live with parent(s) and siblings who had migrated to Sweden a few years before. These multiple challenges shaped how and in what social spaces young migrants could make new friends.

Upon arrival in Sweden, most of the young people could enrol either in ‘Welcome Classes’ or in ordinary classes with their peers. Schools are assumed to be natural spaces where young people can mix and easily find new friends (Harris, 2016). Instead, common in all stories was a sense of frustration, when realizing that making friends in Sweden turned out to be ‘hard work’. Roman (age 22) came to Sweden from Romania at 17 years old and had to study Swedish for about a year with other newcomers of his age:

I assumed it would be easy for me to learn a new language, to meet new friends and that sort of thing. But it was not that easy at all. The Swedish language is quite strange and difficult to learn, but to find friends was even harder. If you cannot speak the language, how can you make new friends?

Roman presents a rather dramatic and daily challenge that all participants had to deal with, the realization that meeting new friends requires a lot of effort and competencies, including long-term residence and language skills that he lacked (Wiltgren, 2017). Although most of the young people had learned Swedish well a year or two after arrival, their self-perceptions as competent users of a new language did not always coincide with how others perceived them (Young, 2020).

Monica told us that her family had a Swedish friend, whom she marked as an important adult in her family and kin networks. Having such support, according to conventional standards, would ease the process of adapting to a new society, but still Monica described a feeling of loss:

It was about places and people but also my identity, in a sense. I do not know how to explain this. When I came here it felt as if who I really was, or especially where I came from, was not ok. Later, when we moved to another area [i.e., where the majority were Swedish born], I was the only one with a strange surname and everyone had somehow distanced from me, they did not want to talk to me, as if they were afraid of me. I was asking myself: Well, do they want me to tell them where I come from?

Monica’s experience illustrates that a ‘strange’ name or code of behaviour could serve as a marker of ‘otherness’, creating boundaries for her inclusion among her school peers (Wiltgren, 2017).

The high-school context turned out to be more welcoming and enabling of friendships. Yet as the story above bears witness, during their first years in Sweden, almost all participants had to undertake enormous relational work to overcome ‘being othered’ (Tajic & Lund, 2022, p. 3). Despite the traditional understanding of friendships as voluntary and equal ties (Davies, 2019; Smart et al., 2012), the young people could seldom choose their friends or feel that they had been chosen, stumbling over subtle social boundaries that ‘were so clear even though no one has stated them’ (Lundström, 2020, p. 218). Foreign names, an accent when speaking Swedish, and bodily and other signs of personal appearance were frequently mentioned as ‘invisible walls’ hindering them from making new friends. On a few occasions, participants talked about explicit social boundaries to friendship-making, such as being positioned as inferior in terms of social class, faith and place of residence, which is echoed in other research (Harris, 2016; Iqbal et al., 2017). Not being able to choose or not being chosen as a friend is a sensitive issue, yet the young people’s stories highlight agency and ability to seek alternative spaces where new friendships could be created.

When recording their friends in the network maps, participants named 4–17 people, each of whom they considered friends. Importantly, most of their friendship ties were created post-migration, with only a few participants being able to preserve ‘old’ friendships in their country of birth. Young people chose different strategies and different social sites to form new friendships. Their practices clearly reflect the importance of the social contexts and other significant relationships (Bergnehr, 2020; Spencer & Pahl, 2006), including their school teachers, parents or significant adults, who at times could bring young people together to form friendships.

Co-ethnic Friendships

Faced by estrangement and initial loneliness in Sweden, digital spaces were frequently used to meet new friends post-migration. Seeking affiliation with others who spoke the same mother tongue led to co-ethnic friendships, sometimes lasting a long time. Anna (age 16), 12 years old on arrival, tried her best to make new friends among her classmates in Sweden. When that did not work out, she decided to be friend with someone online, which turned out to be her lifeline:

There was a time when I was very active on all possible social media because I did not have any friends in real life. … I started to exchange messages with one girl from Poland. I never met her in person, but we became so close that we could talk about anything, and I know she is a real person. … All my family knows who she is and they all treat her as my best friend even though we have never met.

Although Anna has never met ‘her best friend’ face to face, their friendship is among the few examples among the participants of chosen and indeed very close relationships in which the friends ‘share their lives’, as she put it, but also integrate them in their wider personal communities, such as their family (Spencer & Pahl, 2006). In several cases, digital platforms were not merely substituting for face-to-face relationships; instead, they served as important alternative spaces for finding peers and sometimes even romantic relationships. Discovering common interests and gaining deep intimate knowledge of each other served as important ‘glue’, enabling adolescents’ friendships to evolve and last (Bergnehr et al., 2020; Buler & Pustulka, 2021). This is how Amanda (age 29), born in Poland, was able to form a new friendship back in her country of origin:

When I was sixteen, I met one of my [still] best friends. We met via the Internet. [It was] one of my happiest times because I could actually … communicate with people in Polish. … Yes, there was … a girl, she was, is in my age … we met via a chat and started to talk about books. … then about music, then she told me that she really likes to write as I do. So, we started writing, um, what’s it called? Novellas.

Anna’s and Amanda’s examples corroborate previous research showing that, during adolescence, it is quite natural for young people to seek opportunities for ‘self-disclosure, intimacy and interpersonal trust’ (Hoare, 2019, p. 203; see also Bergnehr et al., 2020) among peers, who may be undergoing the same processes of identity construction and development. Newly found and transnational co-ethnic friendships acquire a particularly important role, because speaking the same language allows, despite the distance, one to gain a more profound understanding, share problems and feel safe.

Social sites enabling new co-ethnic friendships locally in Sweden were mother-tongue language classes, family networks and activities in the Polish Catholic Church (the last was examined elsewhere, see Shmulyar Gréen et al., 2021). Some young people met new friends in public places, facilitating ‘spontaneous and transient forms of togetherness’ (Harris, 2016, p. 502), which could develop into deeper relationships. As Jonatan (age 24) from Romania, 12 years old on arrival in Sweden, explained:

I was on a tram, on my way to the introductory Swedish class. I heard a guy speaking Romanian and approached him. I asked: What are you doing here? We began talking and quickly became very close. Six months later the same guy helped me translate a conversation with the headmaster of the school we both attended. … We are still friends and do a lot of things together.

This is one of the few examples in our study of an incidental exchange in public becoming a closer friendship. Jonatan and his Romanian friend expanded their ‘perceived similarity’ (Bergnehr et al., 2020), based on speaking the same language and coming from the same country, to later attending the same school in the suburbs, but also to struggling with a similar ‘experience of being outsiders in relation to Swedish society’ (Fangen, 2010, p. 145).

Forming co-ethnic friendships did not always lead to self-chosen and supportive socialities, especially in the social settings of primary schools in diverse neighbourhoods. Faustyna Maj had had a rather positive attitude towards moving to a new country and liked studying. She was also eager to befriend some ‘native’ Swedes:

[In my school class] I felt isolated despite wanting to be kind to the pupils born in Sweden, but they did not want to communicate with us. … In this way I did not have any other choice than to become friends with somebody other than ‘them’, even though I did not like hanging around with my mates [i.e., Polish-born peers].

There were several positive examples in the study of having co-ethnic ties in school, as a way to keep up one’s native language or get quick help with translations to Swedish. Co-ethnic socialities can also be promoted by the teachers in the hope that peers of the same ethnic background can understand one another better. However, Faustyna Maj and some others sometimes found co-ethnic ties counter-productive for their socialization in school and in wider society (Fangen, 2010; Sime & Fox, 2015).

Inter-ethnic Friendships

Notably, 10 of 18 participants marked new friendships in their network maps that could be characterized as inter-ethnic, either with ‘native’ Swedes or with young people of migrant background. In the context of cultural diversity, now also prominent in Sweden, ethnic mixing can occur as an ordinary part of everyday life (Harris, 2016), for instance, in international schools or the ‘Welcome Classes’. Bogdan was encouraged to apply to an international high school by one of his teachers, to strengthen his motivation to study. Besides gaining higher self-esteem related to his school performance, Bogdan made new friends who shared his high educational aspirations:

Two of my most important friends attend the same high school as I do, and they came from different countries. They help me a lot. If I need help in making some decision, I turn to them. If I need some useful hints, I come to them. They are like brothers to me.

Contrary to his experience in childhood, when he thought of himself as a loner, Bogdan began sharing engagement and support with his ‘study buddies’ at school. The fact that they come from different countries was not important to him. In Fangen’s (2010) terms, what mattered was that Bogdan hung around with someone ‘who has the same high ambitions in life’.

In retrospect, the older the participants become, the more some of them developed close social bonds with people of different ethnic or social backgrounds. Inter-ethnic friendships and everyday conviviality developed during their studies in high school and university, among colleagues at workplaces, and to some extent through religious practices. However, to be able to trust and meet new friends later in life, several of them had to overcome longer or shorter periods of exclusion and othering (Wiltgren, 2017, 2020) during their years of primary education in Sweden. During this time, ‘ice-breaking friendships’ (Harris, 2016, p. 511) were extremely valuable, and without them the participants would be unable to experience the sharing and sense of importance central to the development of deeper friendships.

When Märta started fourth grade in an ordinary class with mainly ‘native’ Swedish peers, she felt it was ‘cool but also very difficult’. There were no pupils born in Poland in her class, and she missed the girls from different countries that she met in the ‘Welcome Classes’. Märta described herself as shy, not bold enough to speak Swedish. She indicated that her teachers might have asked some pupils to keep her company, because ‘they kind of knew that I was feeling a bit lonely’. One special person, Märta remembers with gratitude, was a Swedish peer from a parallel class. They met during the school breaks at a swing:

Both of us wanted to hang around together, so thanks to her I dared to speak out and I felt very happy about it.

Due to this encounter with a Swedish-born peer and their interest in each other, Märta felt included and appreciated for who she was.

Being much younger on arriving in Sweden, Vera still could not feel ‘ordinary’ and ‘non-strange’ (Tajic & Lund, 2022) among her class peers. She had to get used to not being invited to various social events organized by her classmates. Vera’s ‘ice-breaking friend’ was ‘a kind of person who stuck out from the rest’. Having an immigrant background but born in Sweden, she was more integrated in the class than Vera was:

She was a kind person who took me in when all others just kept a distance, or tried to keep me at a distance. She was the only one who, like, gave me a hand and just: ‘Hi, we can be friends’. So, we became friends and spent a lot of time together in middle school.

Making friends with peers who themselves ‘stuck out’ from ‘ordinary Swedishness’ was one strategy that several young people developed for creating an alternative space for solidarity and inclusion, in which ethnicity per se did not matter, but a ‘shared attitude’ (Harris, 2016, p. 512) to a complex reality of layered otherness did (Wiltgren, 2017).

Conclusions

Focusing on migrant youth of European backgrounds, this article reveals that family mobility represents a clear rupture in young people’s personal relationships (Jamieson & Highet, 2013), where separation from friends is imbued with feelings of displacement and insecurity, even for those who are positive about the move. As a result, young Europeans’ intimate relations become embedded transnationally, involving complex processes of maintaining old and meeting new friends post-migration.

Old friendships back in their countries of birth remain part of the participants’ identities, something comforting and familiar they try to hold on to when settling in a new country, learning a new language and developing new relationships. Our findings suggest that, while old friendships may persist despite the geographical distance, visits are necessary to enable sharing the joy of physical presence and common memories. The ongoing transnationality of old friendships is only partly supported by mobile technologies, because dual engagement ‘here’ and ‘there’ is challenging, as others also have shown (Morosanu, 2013). With time, friendships in their birth countries fade away, even though some participants could deepen previously conflicted relations, confirming that friendships can undergo crises and evolve due to the new context and agency of those involved (Sime & Fox, 2015; Spencer & Pahl, 2006).

The findings speak to those of Bagwell and Schmidt (2011) and Hartup and Stevens (1997), who noted that, in early and late adolescence, young people value friendships and put considerable effort into making and keeping friends. However, we argue that previous research has insufficiently attended to the multi-sited character of friendships and the demanding relational investment they require post-migration. The interviews and visual material bear witness that it was ‘hard work’ (Lundström, 2020) to make new friends in Sweden, requiring time, multiple adaptations, adult help and considerable self-reflection. The spaces in which friendships developed were crucial for whether new friends were created along co- or inter-ethnic lines. With some prevalence of inter-ethnic friendships over time, it is clear that in Swedish primary schools, supposed to be a locus of natural mixing with others, young migrants felt they were ‘marked as different’ (Fangen, 2010, p. 136) and ‘non-ordinary’ (Tajic & Lund, 2022) and were avoided by peers of both native and immigrant backgrounds. While struggling to be accepted by classmates in school, the young people befriended co-ethnic youths living in Sweden or back in their birth countries. But the very fact of having experience of being excluded left deep traces in their future patterns of befriending new people. ‘Best’ friends were usually from the same country, met online or outside the school setting. The strength of these relationships was determined by a sense of ‘experienced similarity’ (Bergnehr et al., 2020), including mutual disclosures, shared interests and loyalty during an ‘identity-sensitive developmental stage’ (Hoare, 2019, p. 215).

We can conclude that building friendships in a new country is crucial not only for breaking down isolation (Shmulyar Gréen et al., 2022) but also for self-esteem and social performance in the young migrants’ later lives. More research is needed on the importance of ‘ice-breaking’ friends (Harris, 2016), often more established migrants or native peers, who use their ‘Swedishness’ as a ‘distinct social and symbolic position’ (Wiltgren, 2017, p. 341) to help young migrants build a sense of self-reliance, mutuality and safety.