This article explores what newly arrived men with migrant backgrounds narrate about their vocational education and career choices in Sweden, focusing on how the expression must (Swedish: måste) is used to describe societal demands and constraints. Drawing on twelve semi‑structured interviews with men who arrived as refugees or through family reunification during or after the 2015 peak in asylum arrivals to Europe, and who participated in adult vocational education (Yrkesvux), the study explores how education and work are narrated under migration‑related and labour‑market conditions. The analysis adopts a theory‑informed, deductive approach guided by selected concepts from Bernstein’s sociology of education, including pedagogic discourse, recognition and realisation rules, and recontextualisation. This framework is used to interpret how institutional requirements are narrated as necessities and translated into concrete educational and vocational choices. The findings show that must functions as a linguistic marker of constrained agency in four recurrent ways. It is used to narrate legal and economic compulsion related to residence permits and income thresholds; to index strategic adaptation when prior education or qualifications are not recognised; to express existential responsibility in relation to family obligations and time pressures; and to signal struggles over recognition, legitimacy and inequality within educational and migration regimes. By analysing must as a narrative marker, the article contributes a linguistic and narrative perspective to research on integration and labour‑market participation, showing how policy demands are recontextualised into everyday reasoning about education, work and future possibilities, and how choice is constructed and negotiated within institutionally constrained conditions.