Volume 66, Issue 4 - Special Issue: Governing the Poor - Migration and Poverty

In contrast to the nexus between welfare and migration control, the link between migration and poverty (or rather the perception of poverty), has not received the same amount of political interest, but also public and scholarly attention. Yet, there are multiple ways in which migrants are rendered or perceived as poor in receiving states after having migrated. Hence, this special issue addresses the intersection of migration and poverty. The contributions cover various socio-legal, political and discursive aspects of how state institutions and non-state agencies address, and how poor citizens and migrant individuals in the broadest sense deal with, precariousness and discrimination in the states where they have settled or within which they have moved. In public and political discourse, migrant individuals are often portrayed as underserving, needy and dependent on the ‘receiving states’. Yet, what is often overlooked is how this assumed dependency is constructed by policies and laws, encouraged by media practices and everyday street-level implementation, to the degree that it demonises the foreign ‘other’, accused of misusing welfare assistance. At the same time, we find similar framings regarding marginalised citizens, such as welfare recipients, which discloses the moral character of social policies and a hierarchy of deservingness-recognition. Within the special issue, we critically discuss how such representations and policy mechanisms allow for the discriminatory circumscription of rights and services of the ‘poor’ and migrants that are deeply embedded in welfare chauvinist attitudes, causing significant control and surveillance by the state.

Based on an ethnographic survey conducted in services for the homeless in French-speaking Switzerland, this paper examines street-level social workers’ struggles between the implementation of official policies and their direct work with people. Beyond their common condition of homelessness, people looking for shelter are a very heterogeneous group: undocumented migrants and foreign workers rub shoulders with poor, local pensioners, or with persons suffering from drug addiction or mental illness. Guided by national and international residence and labour legislation, local authorities and institutions have their own policies – more or less strict in their exclusion of poor migrants – regarding the legitimate beneficiaries of a place in the emergency accommodation system. In this article, we analyse the encounters of street-level social workers with homeless people and examine the practical, value-based and ethical dilemmas they face, as well the use of their discretionary power in making more - or less - appropriate shelter available for destitute migrants.

The special issue discusses the intersections between social welfare and migration control, as well as how stratified access to welfare services is used to govern ‘unwanted’ groups. This article explores these intersections in Denmark’ deterrence-oriented asylum policy regime, analysing the discourses and practices whereby people seeking protection are constructed as ‘undeserving’ poor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in different sites of enforcement of Denmark’s asylum regime as well as interviews with street-level workers and people who sought asylum in Denmark, I trace how the Danish deterrence approach operates through the production of poverty and precarity among people seeking protection in asylum reception camps, deportation-oriented integration programmes, and finally, deportation camps. I show how the Danish welfare state, as a result of the merging of external and internal bordering practices, produces a condition of precarity and (non)deportability that extends from the asylum camps to those awarded temporary protection status. Hence, while the deterrence-oriented Danish policy regime has not proven ‘effective’ from the point of view of immigration control, it has served to reinforced a dualised, hierarchically ordered welfare rights’ regime that gradually erodes the rights and life opportunities of unwanted noncitizen ‘others’.

The U.S welfare reform of 1996 restricted the eligibility of immigrants and introduced a punitive and devolved workfare system. While previous studies explained state variation in the welfare eligibility rules for immigrants, few studies have examined the intersection of immigration and welfare governance within a state. We choose the Californian welfare-to-work (WTW) program as a case, most likely to be inclusive to immigrants. Analyzing statistics, documents, and interviews at the state, county, and frontline levels, however, we also reveal multiple exclusionary mechanisms at various policy levels, such as complicated processes and insufficient translations. Our analysis of immigrant clients’ interviews helps to understand why many immigrants decide not to apply for welfare and how even WTW participants with an immigration background experience fear and are especially vulnerable to unfair treatments. Thus, the implementation of the punitive workfare regime along with the restrictive immigration regime can contradict the aim of WTW-policy to lead families in poverty to selfsufficiency.

The present research deals with the policies directed at young adults on social assistance (YAS) without vocational training and the way implementers themselves as well as the YAS perceive policy implementation. In Switzerland, a currently on-going strategic shift in the policy field of welfare and youth policies has renewed emphasis on vocational education and training (VET) as a first and primary integration step. This policy shift has implications for the socio-political alignment of the cantonal administration. As a guideline, the renewed emphasis on “education first” dictates an approach that follows an economic and paternalistic logic. Building on collected data within cantonal administrations (Basel-City and Geneva) and encounters with YAS, this paper discusses the underlying narratives of these policies and their moral justification patterns.

Until recently, the Mongolian welfare system was entirely category based. However, a new food stamps programme funded by loans from the Asian Development Bank, which targets aid according to proxy means testing, has been introduced as part of the bank’s aim to push Mongolia towards a fiscally sustainable welfare model. The food stamps programme is presented as efficient and responsible in contrast to Mongolia’s universal child money programme. Based on long-term participant observation research in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar, areas inhabited by many rural-urban migrants living in poverty, this paper compares the two programmes, interweaving street-level accounts of the experiences of residents and bureaucrats alike with the respective histories and funding sources of the two programmes. Doing so provides a multi-level analysis of the emergent welfare state in Mongolia, unpicking the ‘system’ that ger district residents encounter, linking the relative influence of international financial institutions to democratic and economic cycles, and offering a critique of the supposed efficiency of targeted welfare programmes.

The paper analyses and assesses social policy reforms of the conservative, far-right and right-wing populist coalition government in Austria between 2017 and 2019 in the light of the debates about welfare chauvinist, authoritarian and populist social policies. The latter had gained in importance over the previous years due to the upsurge of far-right and right-wing populist parties and the (at least partial) accommodation of mainstream parties to this tendency in many countries. The policies of the government were based on the view that the social problems associated with immigration were (at least) one of the main underlying causes for the problems affecting the Austrian society. The paper shows that the government initiated strategies to tackle these developments via a renationalisation of social policies. The analysis is focused on implemented and planned activities geared mainly towards the (former) margins of the Austrian welfare regime (social assistance, active labour market policies, unemployment assistance, youth integration policies), as well as on the ideological articulations the government uttered to justify these reforms via the combination of welfare chauvinist orientations with centre-right concerns about market dynamics and public finances. Our analysis concludes that nativist/racialised, nationalist and welfare chauvinist social policies transcend the distinction of deserving and non-deserving social groups, which raises the question about the social imaginaries that lie beneath the attempts of far-right political actors to shape societies through the reform of welfare.