‘It’s Hard Work Making Friends’: Transnational Mobility and Friendships Among Young European Migrants in Sweden

Research on friendship does not fully acknowledge the multi-sited character and ‘hard work’ involved in maintaining old and making new friends. This article addresses this gap, drawing on repeated interviews with and visual data for 18 young people from Poland and Romania living in Sweden. It shows that their friendships are transnationally embedded, enduring tensions and disruptions. Few participants could preserve old friendships ‘back home’, but some sought new friends there through social media. New friendships were developed in different spaces, with a sense of shared experience and perceived similarity determining whether friends were created through co- or inter-ethnic ties. Retrospectively, young migrants valued the help of ‘ice-breaking friends’, helping the participants dare to befriend new people. In the long run, inter-ethnic friendships prevailed, but in most cases, best friends were still among co-ethnics in Sweden or in their country of birth.