This thesis studies the National Labour Market Board (AMS) and the role it played during the Assyrian/Syrian migration during the 1960s and 1970s. AMS was created at the end of the 1940s with full employment as its main goal. During the 1950s and 1960s this seemingly worked perfectly and AMS had considerable influence on the migration patterns to Sweden. However this changed during the 1970s and a combination of events turned the Swedish economy to a decline. At this point in time a relatively great number of Assyrians/Syrians refugees started to migrate to Sweden. The thesis uses Bo Rothstein’s writings about Sweden as a corporate state as a starting point. Rothstein argues that the “corporate spirit” that had greatly influenced the Swedish politics since the 1930s started to decline during the 1980s in all sectors. I argue that the Assyrian/Syrian migration in the middle of the 1970s is the start of this decline in the labour market sector. I also argue that AMS influential position on the migration field ends, or at least greatly decreases as a result of the Assyrian/Syrian migration.

This thesis investigates Zigenarundersökningen [the Gypsy study] – a socio-medical study of Swedish Roma conducted in 1962-1965. The Study was financed by the National Labour Market Board, which sought scientific information on every adult Roma citizen in order to plan for targeted authority interventions. The socio-medical team used a number of different medical and social techniques, drawing together different kinds of data – from the molecular to the social level – and adding “objective” records from public institutions, which resulted in the creation of detailed and voluminous individual case files. On the basis of these files, the public health specialist John Takman in charge of the socio-medical examinations formulated a professional opinion on each individual and family. During the execution of the study, new scientific and social questions were articulated, resulting in that the originally limited investigation concerning only a smaller group of Roma citizens evolved into a comprehensive research project covering all people identified as Swedish Roma. In this thesis, this expansion is analysed using methodological tools from Science and Technology Studies that focus on the reflexivity between the goals of scientific actors, and the social conditions and problematisations that surround them. In this way, science and policy mutually influence each other in situated practices, which also involves the drawing of scientific boundaries that serve to establish epistemic authority.   Departing from Engin F. Isin’s theory on social citizenship, and its alterities, as constituted in contingent and contextualised social practices, and from Franca Iacovetta’s study of Canadian gatekeepers’ work in cold-war Canada, the thesis investigates how the, with time, increasing and more comprehensive activities of experts and professionals created new dimensions of citizenship. Against this background, the thesis draws the conclusion that the scientific-political examinations of problematised citizenship and citizens in Sweden in the 1960’s, while defining deviance, also defined normality. This implies, furthermore, that scientific measurements and classifications of alterity contributed to constituting those measuring and classifying – the experts and professionals – as virtuous citizens, in accordance with contemporary norms of professionalism and expertise, while the Roma were continually constructed as problematic citizens. Hence, scientific-political activities concerning Swedish Roma in the 1960’s created new spaces of social citizenship, where the contents of both normality and deviance were nuanced and (re)defined.