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Abstract:This article analyses problem framings in public debates on family migration in Finland. The study focuses on the less examined category of age and how it intersects with gender, race and religion. We examine the discursive context within which parliamentarians and the media negotiate questions of migration policies, belonging and citizenship. Our analysis identifies problem framings by combining frame analysis with the 'What is the problem represented to be?' (WPR) approach, which understands policies as problematizations.We found that the debates held up the rather common notion of vulnerable women and children as groups that tighter family migration policies protect. The debates excluded certain racialized migrant families from cultural citizenship. Simultaneously, however, the public debate 'whitewashed' other families to make them suitable for inclusion. Here, the right to care for elderly family members played a central part in negotiations over cultural citizenship.Keywords: family migration, cultural citizenship, race, media, parliamentary debates, intersectionality The names of the authors appear in alphabetical order to indicate equal contribution to the article.

This article focuses on the role of bureaucrats in Finnish immigration administration and sheds light on how they evaluate family relations of marriage migrants. It is based on interviews with staff at the Finnish immigration office and local police stations who deal with residence permit applications on the ground of marriage. By using the analytical framework of moral gatekeeping, I identify culture, gender, and temporality as central elements of the gatekeeping procedure. The article argues that bureaucrats combine cultural relativism with an essentialist view that expects migrants to adhere to indigenous cultural norms. They expect migrants to prove a belonging to what the bureaucrats perceive of as a certain culture of origin. The article furthermore sheds light on the gendered understandings of spouses in the immigration process. Finally, it explores temporality and the awareness of how the passage of time affects migrants’ marriage credentials and thereby jeopardizes bureaucrats’ decision-making process.

In 2012, two Afghan asylum seekers camped outside the Parliament building in Helsinki during a hunger strike that lasted for 72 days. Although the protest was very visible in the city space, the mainstream media and most politicians ignored it. This paper analyzes the protest and its mediation through the concepts of borderscape and visibility. Using methods of visual and discourse analysis, we examine the ways in which the hunger strike protest and its mediation negotiate the (in)visibility of borders. We show how the city can be a site for both policing and for politicizing asylum issues. In particular, we focus on the ways in which protesting asylum seekers embody borders and border control, making dislocated borders visible in spaces where citizens do not see them. view on borders that sees bordering as a practice that disperses borders in physical and socio-political space. Moreover, we examine the mediated reactions of various agents, such as the Lutheran church, activists, politicians, and journalists, as well as the protesters themselves, focusing on visibility as social recognition. Our analysis of the hunger strike reveals the situated gaze of social actors. It shows how border struggles are situated within landscapes of politics of protection and politics of listening.