Every day, software developer Besnik Barani dreads receiving the final ruling from the Migration Court that will mean his 20-year-old daughter Finesa – who hopes to study Mechatronics at the prestigious Chalmers University of Technology this autumn – will instead get deported to Kosovo.
"The court might make a decision at any moment, and then I think she will have four weeks to leave," he tells The Local from his home near Gothenburg. "It's affecting me a lot."
Finesa's application was rejected when Barani applied for permanent residency two years ago, a decision that he still finds bewildering.
"It really doesn't make sense," he says. "They say they want experienced workers, and in order for you to have experience, you have to have some years behind you, right? So most probably, you will also have kids. What they're saying is, 'we want experienced workers, but not their kids'."
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Barani and Finesa's case is a classic example of the trap that work permit holders face if they apply for permanent residency after their children turn 18. While under work permit rules children are eligible for a residency permit as a dependent until age 21, under the rules for permanent residency they stop being counted as dependants at age 18.
Barani was already aware that Finesa's age might cause issues when he applied for permanent residency two years ago, but he was assured by an advisor at the Migration Agency that she would be eligible for a permit.
"I went personally to the Migration Agency and asked them if there would be any problem – but I asked them verbally, not by email or in writing," he says. "Their answer was, 'we don't think there will be any problems, unless your daughter has been involved with crime or something '."
It only took four days to discover how misleading this advice was: Barani and his two younger children were granted permanent residency. His wife was granted temporary residency. But Finesa was rejected. After the Migration Agency’s decision, and in order to avoid the family being split apart, Besnik believes that young adults are practically left with what he describes as “three impossible solutions”: getting married, finding a job, or applying for a study permit.
She had no plans to get hitched at 18, and neither Barani nor his daughter wanted her to start work straight after graduating from upper secondary school.
"If you get a job, then you don't study, and then you don't get qualified for a good job in the future," Barani argues. "And at the same time, no student can get the salary they are asking for to qualify."
As for the third option, Barani estimates that sending Finesa to Chalmers as an international student would cost him about 500,000 kronor in student fees. "Even though I have a salary above the average in Sweden, that's still too much for me."
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Finesa's first two weeks interning at Chalmers have made her ever more determined to study there, and she still plans to apply this spring in the hope that the appeal will go her way.
"I love the whole environment. They're all like, PhD students or post-docs and engineers. It's amazing," she says. "It's engineering everywhere and I really love that, so it definitely makes me way more keen to go."
She and the other intern in the department are helping a group of professors design a learning platform for industrial workers. But as she researches various topics for them, she still feels the prospect of having to move to Kosovo, where she hardly knows anyone, hanging over her.
"It's always in the back of my mind. But there's really nothing I can do about it, so I just try to enjoy the moment and make the most of what I can do every day. I try not to think too much about it, because it doesn't bring any good."
She feels that the situation she and other young foreign citizens face as a result of the teen deportation problem is both unjust and counterproductive for Sweden.
"I think it's very unfair and very unwise of them. They're losing very capable people who could contribute a lot to Swedish society."
While Barani still feels valued at AFRY, the engineering company where he works, but the ordeal is damaging his faith in Sweden as a country, particularly when he hears Sweden's migration minister, Johan Forssell, talk about "regulated migration".
"It's like a magic word that the minister of migration uses all the time. But what is 'regulated migration', who is regulating it and how is it being regulated? Is it regulated migration when you expel kids, when you split up families, when you say that European laws do not count for anything?"
He reacts particularly strongly to Forssell's stated ambition to encourage more highly skilled workers to immigrate to Sweden.
"I think it's a joke. I was helping recruit other highly skilled people, but I stopped because I didn't feel they deserved such a situation. I don't recommend anyone to come here anymore – because if you have kids, you are kind of inevitably going to have this problem."
READ ALSO: What are the proposed solutions to Sweden's teen deportation problem?
When the family's problems began two years ago, the teen deportation issue was rarely mentioned in the Swedish media. Now when it dominates the political agenda, Barani is hopeful that change is on the way, even if he fears that it will be too late for him.
"My thinking is that this will be solved, for sure, but I don't know if it will be solved for me and my daughter."
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