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Abstract

This paper examines how Uzbek migrants in Finland and Sweden navigate increasingly restrictive and bureaucratically complex Nordic migration regimes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2022 and 2025—including interviews, focus groups, and digital ethnography—it explores how migrants with precarious or transitional legal statuses respond to administrative opacity, discretionary enforcement, and shifting residence and labour regulations.

The presentation advances the concept of subversive mobilities to capture how migrants strategically use cross-border movement, timing, and jurisdictional differences to manage risk and sustain legal presence. It also introduces vernacular legal navigation as a conceptual framework for understanding how migrants engage with law as a plural, culturally mediated field rather than a coherent and transparent system. Through informal knowledge networks, peer advice, digital platforms, and performative compliance, migrants reinterpret and tactically respond to institutional constraints.

By foregrounding everyday practices of legal reasoning and adaptation, the presentation highlights tensions between formal legal frameworks and lived legality within Nordic welfare states. It argues that migrant agency is not simply oppositional or rights-based, but adaptive, relational, and situated within the moral and bureaucratic complexity of European migration governance.