(Non)paradoxes of temporary protection: Ukrainian female refugees in search of their own time and place

Introduction

The image of a permanent guest is at first sight contradictory (Still, 2010). Nevertheless, it is similar to how scholars have described the nature of migration in a world divided by national borders (Anderson, 2013; Sayad, 2006). Temporary protection status (TP) seemingly avoids such contradiction by emphasising the temporariness of the stay of the guest – war refugee. However, the question that comes to mind is whether, in the case of war refugees, we can honestly consider the temporary nature of their stay? How long is temporary? How safe will be a home country – in this case Ukraine – after the war? Are we not just deluding ourselves?

With this doubt and especially the past experience with refugees from the war in the former Yugoslavia (Joly, 1998; Karaçay, 2023), TP can be described as a paradox. Such a label carries with it a carefully articulated moral condemnation, an astonishment at the inhumanity of migration regimes, but it seems more useful to look at how it came about, what hierarchies of power it exhibits, and with what effects. The concept of paradox gives the impression of unintendedness and indeed TP can be seen as a mixture of intended and unintended consequences. However, this does not change the fact that TP is not a neutral legal framework among other migration schemes, on the contrary, it is performative and shapes the aspirations of its holders. In the way it shapes them, it is possible to read what Sayad (2006) calls ‘the state’s reason’ and its interests regarding migration.

As a result of the displacement of people due to the conflicts in the former Yugoslavia after 1991, the EU created the institute of TP, which limited the scope of the 1951 Refugee Convention and reduced the obligations of EU states towards refugees to encourage more states to receive those fleeing a war and spread the costs across the EU. It was first activated in March 2022 after the beginning of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. In retrospect, TP looks like a compromise. Actors representing refugee interests have understood that compliance with the 1951 Convention is no longer possible. For governments, however, forced migration is written into the concept of circular migration in Europe, where workers come to a country temporarily and return back when their visa-related employment ends, or they terminate it themselves. TP thus limits the refugees’ future perspectives, but this does not mean that it abolishes their agency. Understanding how their agency works under such conditions will be key to knowing where the institute of TP and in general expected transformation of asylum as such will evolve. That is why this study asks: How do Ukrainian TP holders cope with the (non)paradox of TP? How do they perceive their agency? And what lessons can we take from this for the institutes of TP and asylum in the future?

To answer these questions, this article adopts a constitutive (Putnam et al., 2016) and power-sensitive (Berti and Simpson, 2021) approach to the paradox of TP, which could ‘deparadoxify’ it and finally allow us to find a way out of it, both for the protection holders themselves and for the legal-political framework of TP. Accordingly, the study focuses on ‘discourses, social interaction processes, practices, and ongoing organizational activities rather than actors’ cognitions or large-scale systems’ (Putnam et al., 2016: 3) and adopts a bottom-up view of organising that conceives tensions and contradictions developing as part of actions and interactions of TP visa holders and their environment. While unpacking the paradoxes of TP, it would like to contribute to the discussion on the relationship between transnational, class and political economy analysis of migration by emphasising the factor of time in relation to gender.

Migration, socio-spatial mobility and class

The effect of TP status has mostly been studied from a transnational perspective that seeks to avoid nation-state-centricity by highlighting how border crossing becomes part of the migrant’s life. This view has the advantage of overcoming the earlier conception of migration as a unidirectional movement that is limited in time and space, instead creating a migrant-centric framework of a certain transnational identity that disrupts automatically conceived national belongings (Vertovec, 2009). With this emphasis, however, it tends to overlook what happens to the migrant’s position in the economy of a given country (Apitzsch and Inowlocki, 2023; Rye, 2019). This issue remained rather implicit under the description of the impact of TP on the identity and subjectivity of its holders. In the US context, the effects were described as ‘limbo’, ‘temporary citizenship’ (Simmelink, 2011), or ‘permanent temporariness’ (Bailey et al., 2002) that ‘makes closure on the past and passage into the next stages of life difficult’ (Mountz et al., 2002: 349–350). For a similar reason, Mitrić (2013) described the experience of Bosnian refugees in Germany in the 1990s with a ‘Duldung’ visa as ‘floating’. Already in the case of refugees from Ukraine (in Austria), Mijić et al. (2024) describe the experience primarily as a sense of ‘loss’ without a clear vision of the future.

However, in the field of labour studies, the link between temporary work visas, or illegality, and poor working conditions has already been explored. These works (Anderson, 2010; Fudge, 2012; Strauss and McGrath, 2017; Van Kooy and Bowman, 2019; Yeoh, 2006) showed how migrants’ position as workers, reinforced by specific migration statutes, produces a precarity of migrant workers through institutional insecurity that undermines still highly influential assumption that it only takes sufficient time for migrants to settle and move into better (paid) work. However, these studies working with the concepts of precarity and precariousness imply rather a unidirectional movement criticised by the transnational perspective. To avoid this, other scholars worked with the nexus of social and spatial mobility, that was not terminated by arrival in a particular country, i.e. what is usually considered ‘migration’. Boese et al. (2022) discussed how interpretations of individual migrants complicated both the understanding of social mobility as a mere economic change and the relationship between social and spatial mobility as one in which spatial mobility reinforces the potential for social mobility. Instead, the authors showed how migrants’ social mobility trajectories, including aspirations and motivations, were ‘relationally embedded processes, demonstrating nuance to what would otherwise be measured only according to socio-economic indicators of improvement, loss, or immobility’ (Boese et al., 2022 364). In capturing the non-linear development of social mobility that can be simultaneously ‘upwards’ and yet perceived as ‘failed’ due to socio-relational disruption and vice versa, they specifically pointed to the factor of time, where participants’ subjective experience of social mobility was attributable to different combinations of changes (and their speed) in their social and spatial mobility. From a different but complementary angle, Moret (2016) in turn showed how spatial mobility contributed to the construction of internal differences and shaped power relations within ethnically and socio-economically relatively homogeneous networks of migrants.

Other scholars have attempted to capture the changing position in the economy due to migration, while also maintaining a transnational dynamic perspective, by working with the class. Khondker (2018) commented how Bangladeshi workers in the UAE differ in terms of their status, pay packages, and privileges, yet their common political contingency as people who cannot gain citizenship in their host country creates insecurity across their differences. In a different context, Rye (2019) showed how Eastern European workers in a Norwegian coastal town negotiate their different class positions in the two countries they move between as they are uncertain about their decision to return ‘home’. In this case, the study draws attention to the limits of Bourdieu’s framework and shows that workers can develop a transnational identity that encompasses two, often very different, class positions without necessarily experiencing any convergence through the exchange of their capitals.

Indeed, as Rye (2019) argues, all the three dominant class frameworks – neo-Marxist, Weberian, and Bourdieusian – were developed with the nation-state context in mind and do not have a sophisticated analytical apparatus to incorporate international geographical mobility that may partly explain why the concept of precarity as a more process-oriented concept has taken hold. Bourdieu’s conception is often judged more flexible than other class approaches in that it distinguishes between several types of capital and, above all, the possibility of exchanging them (Erel, 2010; Nohl et al., 2014). From Bourdieu’s perspective, if applied to the TP holders, they would differ fundamentally from each other by the different constellation of their capitals that would predetermine their situation in the country they came to. However, this overlooks that they had something fundamental in common, namely the experience of forced migration, which was materialised by the TP visa, that cannot simply be captured by the perspective of capitals-ownership. Moreover, such ‘class mapping’ says little about the actual placement of the migrant in the labour process because it ignores the broader relations of production in which such stratification-conceived classes are situated (Seim and McCarthy, 2023).

Time, agency, gender and oscillating class

Similarly to Rye (2019), Aronowitz (2003) argues that the three great traditions of class theory have the common feature of relying heavily on geographical metaphors. They place people on class maps in positions according to various criteria that are mostly static, such as ownership, income, type of employment, or education. These class maps can be useful for orienting us in a given historical moment, but when understood as a theoretical tool, they fail to explain rapid change and movement. Aronowitz explains this by arguing that they prioritise space (namely the nation-state) over time (and movement) and suggests reversing this sequence. He proposes to shift the concept of class from a cleavage based on relations of ownership of capital ‘to relations of power in all of its domains’ (Aronowitz, 2003: 61). The first axiom of his class theory is ‘the primacy of social time over social space’ (Aronowitz, 2003: 56). Thus, time is not only understood linearly as a scarce resource, although this is also important, but it is also social time in which the ability to imagine the future (orient oneself in the present or re-present the past) together with others is created through relationships. In this sense, Aronowitz prefers the notions of shifts or oscillations to the ambiguous term ‘change’ to emphasise the constant dynamism of this approach. This is useful for his specification of the (working) class: ‘What distinguishes the working class is its lack of relative power over the terms and conditions of employment’ (Aronowitz, 2003: 26). Relative power because Aronowitz relates this power to self-organisation and self-representation of workers resulting from their struggle over their (social) time.

The neglect of time in class theory has its counterpart in migration theory (Çağlar, 2016; Griffiths et al., 2013). Time is there – if mentioned – mainly as an external factor – as a resource. I suggest that it would be more appropriate to incorporate time not only as a constraint, but also as the main dimension of agency, and to explore how time in both dimensions interacts with the control of working conditions. Time is thus understood not only as a scarce resource but also as a ‘navigational capacity [. . . ] to explore the future’ (Appadurai, 2009: 69). Indeed, agency is primarily a temporal phenomenon – Emirbayer and Mische (1998) in their seminal article liken agency to a chord of habit, imagination, and judgement whose dominant tone changes depending on how individuals respond to the diverse and changing environment. Migrant temporalities are not per se different from those of non-migrants (Çağlar, 2016), but they reflect a very particular temporal logic imposed upon them (Carstensen, 2023).

This article tries to strike a difficult balance between understanding people as ‘agents of change’ (Mieres, 2024: 133) within the paradigm of the ‘autonomy of migration’ (Bojadžijev and Karakayali, 2007), and at the same time to explore the constraints on their trajectories, an intersection that is rather overlooked (Ducu et al., 2024). This is done by the use of the concept of aspiration going beyond paid work, which is particularly analytically relevant for women (Boese et al., 2022), especially mothers (Aigner et al., 2024; Gorbach et al., 2024). Specifically, to connect productive and (re)productive spheres, Alberti and Sacchetto (2024) took inspiration from Yuval-Davis (2013) in understanding everyday practices as ‘constituting’, even as a site of conflict and struggle, rather than ‘reducing mundane practices of individuals and groups to mere survival, habit, and repetition, as individuals search for stability in their social reproduction’ (Alberti and Sacchetto, 2024: 60). Such struggles and conflicts do not necessarily correspond to classical notions of organising, social movements and representative politics. They are composed of more subtle cultural, economic, and social practices, even in the form of a slight shift, ‘controlled oscillation’ or ‘search for balance’ (Berti and Simpson, 2021: 255) which can happen across borders – transnationally.

Facing the paradox of TP of Ukrainian refugees, which mainly pits the need for (transnational) social reproduction of women with children against the need for them to work for money, the contradictions ‘cannot be solved logically, but must be confronted practically through situated acts of “bricolage”’ (Clegg, 2002: 498 quoted in Berti and Simpson, 2021: 260). So for this paper, this bricolage of the present and the future will be explored and the class will be examined as something unstable, as a struggle for one’s own aspirations, which is often at the expense of the relative power over the terms and conditions of paid employment because it involves circumstances beyond the workplace, such as childcare, which often affects women in particular (Aigner et al., 2024; Schieckoff, 2024).

Methods

The data comes from two main sources. In Czechia, in the spring of 2023, I conducted 13 biographical narrative interviews with female TP visa holders settled in or around Brno, the second biggest city in Czechia. Among them, there were 10 mothers who arrived with school-age children. The first communication partners among TP visa holders were contacted based on the recommendation by an NGO administered by Ukrainians themselves in Brno, however, due to possible traumatic experiences, the emphasis was on partners feeling completely free to refuse interview requests. Then I continued doing snowball recruitment. Brno had a more specific composition of visa holders, which was also reflected in my sample, they were even more educated than the average, but they also had shorter accommodation because it was difficult to find long-term housing, one could say that it was a very complicated environment for newcomers (Klimešová et al., 2022: 9, 16).

The interviews were composed of three parts. In the first one, I asked interviewees to freely tell their stories from arrival to the present. Only then did I ask supplementary questions. In the last part, I asked about the generalisation of their experience and whether they could have imagined that supporting TP visa holders would have been done differently. Interviews usually lasted 1–1.5 hours and were recorded. There was a symbolic financial reward of 10 EUR for the interview. The questions deliberately did not ask about the details of their departure from Ukraine, but focused only on their stay in Czechia, to minimise any risk of possible re-traumatisation. The interviews were conducted within a framework that was informed by the experience of talking to people affected by the war, as elaborated by NGOs (Duchoňová, 2022). Except for one interview in Russian and one in Czech, they were all in Ukrainian.

The second source of data was three focus groups conducted in December 2023 in Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia. The focus groups were divided into mothers of school-age children living in private accommodation (7), mothers of school-age children living in collective public housing (7), and childless working women (9). The focus groups were administered by a specialised agency, and the researchers prepared their scripts and received audio and video recordings, and original and translated transcripts. The scenarios focused on childcare, work experience, qualifications, language barriers, housing, institutional support, and relationships. As a result, they revolved around similar themes to the interviews conducted a few months earlier in Czechia.

As a supporting rather contextual data source, semi-structured interviews with representatives of the institutions involved in the integration of migrants both in Czechia and Slovakia and several participant observations of their meetings were conducted in the autumn 2022. Partially together with my colleague, we did 8 expert interviews with interlocutors from different institutions, from municipal departments focused on migration through international organisations to NGOs, and participated in two online and two offline meetings.

The research project, interview scenarios and informed consent templates were approved by the ethics committee of the Institute for Sociology of Slovak Academy of Sciences.

Context: Ukrainian TP holders in Czechia and Slovakia

With a delay of a few days, the Czech and Slovak parliaments implemented the decision of the Council of the EU from 4 March 2022 within the scope of Article 5 of Directive 2001/55/EC to introduce TP for Ukrainian refugees at EU-wide level into national legislation. Most importantly, TP holders had free access to the labour market without having to obtain any work permit, as immediately emphasised by the Ministries of Labour in both countries. Newcomers were admitted upon arrival, instead of the bureaucratic machinery of asylum procedure, in large-scale one-stop centres where they received TP visa, insurance and temporary housing provided often by private individuals. Thus, governments have relied on both the assumed self-sufficiency of newcomers supported by the Ukrainian diaspora living in Czechia and Slovakia already before the full-scale invasion, which has then been supplemented by an unprecedented amount of assistance from individual citizens, NGOs, and informal networks. But despite the unprecedented nature of the situation and the significant humanitarian aid, the view of the new arrivals was also framed by the proverbial hundreds of thousands of vacancies from before the invasion. This referred to the intent to fill gaps in sectors experiencing shortages, regardless the professional background, gender and family situation of TP visa holders.

On 11 March 2022, the Czech Parliament approved a proposal by the Czech Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs to pay humanitarian benefits of 5000 CZK (200 EUR) to all newcomers, which was meant to cover the basic needs (Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs of the Czech Republic (MoLSA CZ), 2022). It was paid automatically for the month they received the visa (of tolerance and later TP) and then, after filling out an application in which they also demonstrated income, they could receive the benefit for up to 5 more months. In this scheme, from the seventh benefit, the support was reduced to the then legislated minimum subsistence level of 4620 CZK (185 EUR) for adults and 3320 CZK (133 EUR) for under 18 years, and ‘income, assets and social circumstances’ were monitored even more closely (MoLSA CZ, 2022). A year later, from July 2023, the system was changed. The benefit served only as a supplement to the cost of living if the income did not exceed the minimum amount, with a distinction between ‘vulnerable’ (children, carers of children under 6 years and disabled persons, pregnant women, students 19–26 years, people older than 65 years, disabled persons) and ‘non-vulnerable’.

Actually, in addition to the humanitarian benefit, the second and ultimately more significant form of support was solidarity contributions to households that housed refugees in their homes free of charge. Thus, the July 2022 Refugee Census (Klimešová et al., 2022) found that half of the refugee households had accommodation provided completely free of charge, the vast majority lived in an apartment or part of a house that they had reserved for themselves. According to the census, over 75% of refugees were satisfied with their accommodation. However, the financial situation was perceived to be quite the opposite. Approximately 75% of the refugees were in a very unsatisfactory to critical financial situation. Already at given time, half of those in free accommodation were ‘unable to cope and in desperate need of help’ (Klimešová et al., 2022: 3). Indeed, the humanitarian benefit linked to TP of 5000 CZK (200 EUR) did not even reach half of average monthly consumption expenditure per person in Czechia, excluding costs related to housing (Czech Statistical Office, 2022).

In Slovakia, after receiving TP (in the Slovak case, a more accurate translation would be ‘Temporary Shelter’), newcomers from Ukraine were automatically included in the social services system and became eligible for material hardship benefits. In 2022, this was 68.80 EUR for an adult, 130.90 EUR for a person with a child under age of 4 and 191.20 EUR for an individual with a child above age of 5 (Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs and Family of the Slovak Republic (MoLSA SK), 2022a). From May 2022, refugees who did not have a minimum subsistence income were provided with direct financial support by international organisations UNHCR, the Red Cross, UNICEF and IOM, rather than by the state, on the basis of a memorandum of cooperation. The specific amount of financial support for 1 month was 80 EUR for an adult, 60 EUR for a child aged 3–18 and 160 EUR for a child under 3 (MoLSA SK, 2022b). From September 2022, support has been transferred back to the state under material need support framework. Similarly to Czechia, support for TP visa holders was mainly based on accessible accommodation. The state provided it free of charge in large-scale facilities, but it also subsidised private landlords in large numbers by a system of reimbursement of 5 EUR per night per refugee.

As far as the employment situation of refugees is concerned, in Czechia already In July 2022, more than half of the refugees were already economically active, 75% of them perceived their work as permanent (Klimešová et al., 2022). A large proportion were working for employers with more than 250 employees in six sectors (mainly manufacturing, logistics, construction), most in occupations labelled as low-skilled (80%) which meant 44% of positions were in ‘machine and equipment operators, assemblers’ and a further 36% were in ‘support and unskilled workers’. This census report explicitly pointed to ‘not using the potential of refugees’ (Klimešová et al., 2022: 25). The reasons were deducted as: lack of knowledge of Czech; work and/or residence are perceived as temporary; for personal reasons there was no interest in more mentally demanding work; there were problems with recognition of qualifications. In June 2023, a year since that ministry census and a year and a half since the full-scale invasion, the situation has not changed much. Research suggested that the proportion of refugees working well below their qualifications was falling only very slowly, if at all (PAQ Research, 2024; Šafářová et al., 2023). In Slovakia, in April 2022, the situation was similar, almost 40% of the jobs filled by TP visa holders fell into the group of support and unskilled workers, which required only basic education. A further 56 % of the positions filled by holders required only secondary education according to ISCO. Less than 4 % of the positions filled by TP visa holders required a university degree (Hábel and Veselková, 2022). Until March 2024, the situation did not change much (Department of Labour, Social Affairs and Family SR, 2022, 2024).

Living through temporary protection: ‘you have to knock on the door, and somebody will open it for you’

Institutionally, TP holders were viewed in terms of their commonality, namely Ukrainian citizenship, not in terms of their social position. This seems at odds with the management of migration in Europe in recent years, which has been based on supposedly careful selection based on the concept of skills needed in receiving countries (Hercog and Sandoz, 2018; Liu-Farrer and Shire, 2021). The following sections are primarily intended to illustrate the struggle, often deeply internal and intimate, though embedded in relations, between TP visa holders’ aspirations and their constraints.

Discussion and conclusions

This study asked the questions: How do Ukrainian TP holders cope with the (non)paradox of TP? How do they perceive their agency? And what lessons can we take from this for the institutes of TP and asylum in the future? Based on interviews and focus groups with TP holders themselves, I conclude that the holders were not paralysed by the temporary nature of the protection or the necessity to work. They did not grasp the contradictory demands on them in an overly cognitive way but rather dealt with them practically.

At the abstract level the TP reproduces the division of people into those ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ national state borders, even if this division is obscured by humanitarian, therefore, supposedly supranational purposes. Those ‘inside’ have a certain privileged access to a given place and only in terms of this dominance they temporarily receive ‘guests’ (Derrida, 2021). The paradox of hospitality within TP, then, does not ultimately lie only at the level of a legal framework that could be improved; the paradox lies deeper in the concept of the (nation) state.

But what is lost in this prism of paradox is how these ‘guests’ actually live during their stay. The factor of time stood out in the data, not only as a scarce resource but also as the main dimension of agency. There was an alternating acceleration and deceleration in the lives of the communication partners. Corresponding to these phases were changing aspirations. In this article, aspirations are not understood as ‘pursuit and appropriation of social mobility [as] imperative for status and dignity’ (Boese et al., 2022: 353). Instead, it shows how gender, respectively motherhood, and in general social reproduction, intersected with relative power over the terms and conditions of employment. This intersection resulted in oscillating aspirations, thus oscillating class, because power in different domains intertwined with each other, and thus weakened or strengthened according to the particular constellation. In sum, it was the hierarchy of those who have enough time to cope with the contradictory demands within the paradox of TP that determined whether they perceived it as an insurmountable obstacle or, on the contrary, whether they were able to deconstruct the paradox into its individual elements and deal with them gradually. Not only material support but also more subtle elements entered into life trajectories of TP holders, whether in the form of seeking psychological balance, dialogue with people, but also the element of chance. Several communication partners talked about luck or, on the contrary, bad luck in obtaining housing, a place for their children in school or with a doctor, or even a place in a free language course. Those TP visa holders who did not have this space to reflect on their aspirations, allowed mainly by interactions with others, perhaps because they had to rely more heavily on state institutions and did not have individual help available, then ended up in jobs that did not match their qualifications (and aspirations) or returned back to Ukraine.

Migration policies increasingly tend to follow logistical ideals (Altenried et al., 2018) and aim to provide ‘the right amount of labour power with the right quality (e.g. qualification) at the right moment to the right place’ (Carstensen, 2023: 415). However, research has shown that for migrant women – asylum seekers – is the inability of work particularly frustrating (Hunt, 2008). The institute of TP points to the complexity between the freedom to have formal paid work and the dependency on it that results from the lack of support in the sphere of social reproduction, which in turn undermines this freedom to work. Using the Czech and Slovak cases, it can be confirmed that TP is going from more general emptying of the refugee status towards the status of foreign worker only mediated by individual hospitality. It can be called as another ‘patchwork strategy of immigration laws’ (Mountz et al., 2002).

But instead of focusing on how it constructs identity on different scales, I suggest focusing on how it functions more like a filter that distributes TP holders according to the needs of a country’s division of labour which has also been observed to varying degrees elsewhere, notably in Poland and Austria (Aigner et al., 2024) or France (Gorbach et al., 2024). At the same time, this filter is constructed in a very complex way, leading to oscillating trajectories rather than suggesting that for certain groups of women it is always a clear downwards fall in status, while for others it enables social mobility. From this perspective, it is therefore necessary to deepen our understanding of the political economy of forced migration, while remaining attentive to the very subtle factors that underpin it.