This paper concerns Afghan people´s experiences of interactions with welfare and migration authorities in Sweden. Based on their accounts of multiple rejections and loss of fundamental human rights, the paper applies the concept of bureaucratic violence as a form of neo-liberal power executed by asylum and welfare authorities in tandem to exclude unwanted, discredited people from the Swedish welfare state. Accomplished through repeated small acts of symbolic violence over a long period, this violence does not only make asylum-seekers deportable but also keeps them obedient and controllable while waiting. Tiny acts with pens, keyboards, and documents, making people ‘illegal and deportable’, become lived experiences of ‘slow death’, ‘a loss of a life’ and ‘erosion of hope’. 

Arguments are drawn from two ethnographic projects based on observations and recurrent interviews with people who sought asylum in Sweden around the ‘long summer of migration’ in 2015. A majority of the participants have been young Afghan citizens. For several participants having escaped from violence and deaths by weapons in the country they once left, the signatures of Swedish administrators' pens have become just as violent and life-threatening as the situation they left behind. While some hide or continue their lives in a drawn-out battle with Swedish authorities after seven years of waiting for sanctuary, others have redirected their hope towards other European states. In France, Italy, and Portugal, they have joined a deportspora of Afghans from Sweden, which has been made deportable through signatures and pen strokes. 

The participants' experiences follow years of austerity politics and legal restrictions affecting the wellbeing and futures of people seeking asylum since 2015. Temporary migration laws and increasingly ungenerous praxis in both asylum and welfare contexts, as well as racist public discourses, have since tormented many groups of asylum-seeking people, like Afghans.