The Social Worker as Border Guard: How and Why British Welfare Workers Are Disposed to Control Immigration

Abstract

This article looks at the public provision of social assistance to migrant families residing irregularly in London. It traces and explains the reconstitution of social workers’ professional identities and institutionalized practices that made them part of the ‘hostile environment’ the British government has been creating for irregular migrants. Drawing mostly on in-depth interviews with local welfare bureaucrats, social workers, and NGO practitioners, we identify three governmental moves that played a crucial role in turning social workers into border guards: the shifting of financial burden to local authorities; the linking of migrants’ destitution with their irregularity; and the framing of their expulsion as ‘voluntary return’. We employ a theoretical approach that builds on Foucault's differentiation between three principal modalities of power—law/sovereignty, discipline, and security—and highlights the productive interplay between them. Our analysis shows how the logics of law, discipline, and security complement and reinforce each other within policy, discourse, and everyday practice, and how this contributes to resolving inherent contradictions that otherwise hamper social workers’ participation in immigration control. The findings help to explain the often surprisingly smooth internalization of immigration control into public welfare institutions and to better understand the organizational modalities of everyday bordering within liberal-democratic states.

Introduction

Contemporary borders “are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories [… but] dispersed a little everywhere,” as Balibar (2004, 1) famously noted. Not only does immigration control nowadays happen in many different places but it thereby increasingly (ab)uses organizations that have fundamentally different purposes, including those providing public welfare (Ataç and Rosenberger 2019; Bendixsen and Näre 2024; Broeders and Engbersen 2007; Schweitzer 2022; Van der Leun 2003). This development is part of what Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2018) have described as “everyday bordering” and closely linked to crucial questions asked by Rumford (2008, 2): “who is in a position to create a border?” and who actually “performs the borderwork”? Many studies have shown that the linking of migration control with welfare provision not only undermines migrants’ fundamental rights but also poses serious professional and ethical dilemmas for employees working in the corresponding organizations, like schools, hospitals, universities, or social service departments (e.g., Cuadra and Staaf 2014; Furman et al. 2012; Park and Bhuyan 2012; Schweitzer 2022; Van der Leun 2003; Vrabiescu and Anderson 2024). How should a social worker, for example, deal with the case of a family that lives in the neighborhood and is clearly in need of financial support but unable to prove legal residence rights in the country? Does the latter only make the family ineligible for substantial state support like minimum income subsidies, or does it also override or at least diminish the social worker's duty of care towards children at risk of destitution? Should they provide alternative forms of (more basic and ad-hoc) support, like food vouchers, or better refer the family to a private or civil society organization? Or should they instead inform the immigration authority, and/or try and convince the parents to comply with immigration law by returning to their country of citizenship?

The starting point for writing this article was the first author's observation that many of the social workers he met in the UK seemed more inclined to help the government enforce increasingly restrictive immigration rules, than to provide support for families who seemed to breach these rules—despite the legal, practical, and moral contradictions that this creates for them. The question we wanted to answer is how the British government has produced this widespread inclination among social workers to not only comply with an openly hostile policy but actively perform the everyday borderwork that is necessary to make this policy effective. We thereby follow Tazzioli's (2014, 16) call to “look at the reshuffling of identities produced by the migration regime.” While she primarily referred to the various migrant identities and corresponding categories (“refugee,” “economic migrant,” “illegal migrant,” etc.), we argue that the social worker as border guard is another increasingly important identity that the migration regime needs and therefore produces. Our aim is to show how this production works in practice. To do this, we look at the public provision of social assistance to migrant families residing irregularly ¹ in London, and trace the various governmental mechanisms involved in reconstituting social workers’ professional identities and institutionalized practices. More specifically, we focus on their involvement in relation to two crucial elements of the British migration regime: the creation of what the UK government initially called a “hostile” and later a “compliant environment” for irregular migrants; and the implementation of policies for their so-called “voluntary return.”

We will explain this involvement with recourse to dispositional analysis, an approach that uses Foucault's differentiation between three principal modalities of power—law/sovereignty, discipline, and security—to understand how people are dispositioned to act in certain ways; and that has so far mostly been employed in organization studies (e.g., Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning 2016; Villadsen 2021). Our in-depth qualitative case study not only identifies concrete elements of law, discipline, and security, but also highlights their interplay within policy, discourse, and everyday practice. It shows that the answer to our question lies in the way this interplay affects welfare institutions by simultaneously conditioning organizational practices and reconstituting individual subjectivities. By variously complementing and reinforcing each other, the logics of law, discipline, and security help to resolve inherent contradictions that would otherwise trigger social workers’ resistance against the expanding migration regime. This explains much of the often surprisingly smooth internalization of immigration control into public welfare institutions but also many other spheres of social interaction.

The empirical basis for this analysis consists of 45 semi-structured interviews conducted in and around London (by the first author, between July 2014 and February 2020) with local welfare bureaucrats, social workers, and NGO representatives, as part of two related research projects ² focusing on the involvement of social workers and other welfare practitioners in the implementation of policies targeting migrants in irregular situations. Respondents were purposefully selected based on their specific roles at the intersection between the welfare and migration regimes and in some cases via snowball sampling. Interviews typically lasted between 45 and 90 min, were voice-recorded, fully transcribed, and thematically coded using the qualitative analysis software NVivo. In addition to the interview material, we also draw on contextual data, including academic and grey literature, policy documents, legal provisions, and relevant reports as well as media coverage and press statements made between 2012 and 2020.

The following section reviews the most relevant literature and develops the theoretical framework for our subsequent analysis, which traces the productive interplay of different forms of power first at the level of policy and political discourse, and then within everyday organizational and individual practice.

How to Conceptualize and Explain the Seemingly Willing Involvement of Social Workers in Everyday Borderwork?

The dispersal of borders has been accompanied by an increasing diversification of both the spaces where border control happens, and the actors involved in—and indispensable for—making this control effective. Among these diversifying “borderlands” (Borrelli 2021) are many institutions of the welfare state. It has long been recognized that migration and welfare are intimately linked (Bommes and Geddes 2000) and—more recently—that welfare policy has become a tool of migration control (e.g., Ataç and Rosenberger 2019). Much of the scholarly attention that this development has since then received focused on the making and role of such policies (Broeders and Engbersen 2007; Bendixsen and Näre 2024; Slaven, Casella Colombeau, and Badenhoop 2021), the limited welfare entitlements they create for certain categories of foreigners (Spencer and Hughes 2015; Lafleur and Vintila 2023), and the lived experiences of (irregular) migrants themselves (Benchekroun, Humphris, and Sigona 2024; Bendixsen and Eriksen 2024; Crawley, Hemmings, and Price 2011; Van Osch 2022; Vrabiescu 2017). Other work has focused on the everyday practices through which these policies and changing legal frameworks are being implemented “on the ground” (Cuadra and Staaf 2014; Bruzelius, Ratzmann, and Reiss 2023; Nordling and Persdotter 2021; Schweitzer 2022; Van der Leun 2003; Vrabiescu and Anderson 2024).

Of particular interest here are studies that specifically addressed the question of why social workers often seem to quite willingly accept immigration-related duties despite the contradictions and ethical dilemmas that such involvement tends to entail. Among the first to specifically analyze (and problematize) this involvement were Psimmenos and Kassimati (2003) who explain the “micro-dynamics of power” exercised by Greek welfare workers over migrant clients as resulting from a combination of organizational culture and individual values. What they found was that

[a] mix of personal, financial and managerial incentives seem to motivate officials’ behaviour towards implementing discriminatory and quite racist policies which, according to their opinion safeguard Greek society against the incoming ‘threat’. (ibid., 368)

A central role in influencing social workers’ behavior and decision-making has often been attributed to an increasingly negative framing of (irregular) migration in public or political discourse. For example, Van der Haar (2015, 267) found that social workers in the Netherlands “quite often reproduce a political discourse that highlights migrants as problematic and that turns them into subjects of interventions that particularly police their lives.” Others have highlighted that individual and institutional racism (e.g., Eliassi 2017), as well as social workers’ own ideas about migrants’ un/deservingness of public welfare and their un/belonging to the nation (e.g., Ratzmann and Sahraoui 2021), are decisive for how they perceive and treat migrant claimants. At least indirectly, also their willingness to implement exclusionary policies will thus depend on how immigration is officially portrayed and individually perceived.

The increasingly hostile political climate and negative portrayal of migration in general and irregular migrants in particular has been shown to also interact with other, non-discursive, developments that also seem to foster social workers’ involvement in everyday bordering. In some cases, local welfare providers are legally obliged to report certain categories of migrants to immigration authorities, as a recent study by Bruzelius, Ratzmann, and Reiss (2023) highlighted. Looking at various German cities, they show that individual responses to reporting obligations range from over-compliance to circumvention, and that local governments’ attempts to influence these responses include active support of circumvention strategies (ibid.). Looking at the provision of social assistance to irregular migrants in Malmö, Nordling and Persdotter (2021) identified three parallel developments—the specialization of local social services, the standardization of care practices, and a “juridification of discourse”—that together contribute to irregular migrants’ exclusion from mainstream social services. While their analysis focusses more on the role of municipal guidelines than individual social workers, it suggests that the three developments have accompanied a more general turn away from a needs-based approach and thereby helped the implementation of more restrictive policies. Also Lindberg (2022) has traced the implementation of concrete legal changes regarding minimum welfare provisions in Sweden, where just like in the UK, irregular migrants’ access to even the most basic support was made conditional on exceptional vulnerability or active collaboration in the return process. While her focus is on the perspective of migration case workers and deportation officers, she also cites a municipal social worker who noted that both the hostile political climate and various legal changes had significantly altered “the conditions of social work” in Sweden (ibid., 130/1). Similar ethnographic studies of the internal workings of migration bureaucracies also emphasized the role of various forms of socialization. Borrelli (2021), for example, showed how “organizational socialization” through formal and informal training, including collective reflection and the sharing of professional experiences among colleagues, significantly shape individual street-level bureaucrats’ encounters with, and practices towards, certain categories of migrants. Together, these studies suggest that changing official rules and institutional arrangements, as well as broader shifts in state welfare provision, can also significantly contribute to social workers becoming border guards.

Many other studies analyzed the involvement of social work/ers in immigration control from the perspective of (irregular) migrants themselves (e.g., Benchekroun, Humphris, and Sigona 2024; Bendixsen and Eriksen 2024; Van Osch 2022). Drawing on ethnographic insights into the everyday lives of undocumented families living in Brussels, for example, Van Osch (2022, 1558) argues that it is often through encounters with a social worker that “[s]tate power enters their everyday experiences” (ibid., 1555). Focusing closely on irregular migrants’ encounters with different street-level bureaucrats, other authors found that welfare administrators are generally more willing to be involved in borderwork than professionals (Van der Leun 2003), and social workers more than other professionals (like teachers or doctors), since their work involves more control over their clients and is limited by eligibility criteria that are more often linked to residence status (Schweitzer 2022). Among the many mechanisms that facilitate the involvement of welfare workers in immigration control, Schweitzer (2022, 198) particularly highlights the role of “overlapping institutional logics” that can lead them “to believe that what they are controlling […] is not immigration, but rather the person's identity, place of residence or […] contribution to the welfare system.” The fact that social work always combines care and control explains why social workers are often perceived as bringing state power into peoples’ lives; and it makes them more likely to perceive helping to control immigration as part of their job.

What is arguably missing in this diverse body of scholarship is an overarching framework that helps to understand all these different elements and factors as part of the same governance effort. Like many other critical analyses of contemporary migration governance and everyday bordering practices, both Van Osch and Schweitzer draw on the work of Foucault to understand the exercise of power not (only) as direct and absolute domination but (also) in the form of “governmentality.” Foucault (2002, 341) himself described the latter as “a conduct of conducts” or “a management of possibilities” and thus a way “to structure the possible field of action of others.” Based on this conceptualization, Jones (2013, 174) described the way in which street-level bureaucrats are implicated in such power relations as “the conduct of conduct of conduct,” whereby they “are at once those who govern and those being governed.” This intermediary position is “uncomfortable” because it constantly requires balancing “own personal, political and ethical commitments with organisational and democratically agreed priorities” (ibid., 152)—like, in the case we analyze here, that of excluding irregular migrants from public welfare. Especially when it comes to irregular migrants, contemporary migration governance is certainly not just a “management of possibilities” but also significantly relies on punishment, restraint, and violence (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Walters 2017). In fact, as we will show, it involves all three of the prototypical modalities of power, or “dispositives,” identified by Foucault (2009, 5–6): law/sovereignty, discipline, and security. ³

The modality (or dispositive) of law/sovereignty relies upon a strict binary division between what is permitted and what prohibited, based on which laws then codify all behavior as either legal or illegal and define the corresponding penalties. Any illegal behavior is sanctioned accordingly, and post factum, through punishment of individual wrongdoers and with the relatively simple aim of repressing any legal transgression. Sovereign power is thus essentially negative, and law is its principal instrument (Lichtenstein 2021). When it comes to migration governance, the supposedly clear-cut but in fact always ambiguous distinction between “legal/regular” and “illegal/irregular” entry or presence in a country clearly reflects this kind of power. Disciplinary power, in contrast, works in more complicated ways: the binary division between permitted and prohibited is accompanied by mechanisms aimed at changing the behavior of people more sustainably, which is why wrongdoers are not simply punished but their undesired behavior is to be corrected, or even prevented in the first place. Since discipline not only works on actual but also on potential behavior, and the corresponding “punishment aims at a process of inner transformation,” it requires an extension of the singular “act of ‘punishment’ through a permanent process of ‘surveillance’” (Portschy 2020, 407), which, in turn, requires subjects to be enclosed, confined, and fixed (Foucault 2009). Foucault's best-known example of disciplinary technology is Bentham's panopticon prison; but he also characterized many other institutions including factories, schools, and hospitals as disciplinary spaces (Foucault 1995, 228). Finally, technologies of security do not rely on the fixing and disciplining of individual bodies within enclosures but instead aim to manage flows and circulations across open spaces (Munro 2012). The “good” circulation is to be differentiated from the “bad” one in order to maximize the positive and minimize any negative effects (Foucault 2009, 19). Constant surveillance and control are replaced by punctual interventions necessary to channel flows and flexibly regulate behaviors while largely “letting things move their way” (Portschy 2020, 408). The logic of security is thus neither prohibitive nor prescriptive, but has a strong facilitative element (Villadsen 2021, 477) in the sense that it fosters certain behaviors while simultaneously constraining alternative courses of action. This kind of power is thus not exercised by intervening directly on the individual, but by modifying the “‘milieu’ or the rules of the game, in which the individual makes choices” (Munro 2012, 351).

This links back to the idea of “governmentality,” which has become a popular analytical lens for critical migration and border studies (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Tazzioli 2014; Walters 2015). To better understand “the changing configurations of governance and sovereignty that take shape in borderscapes across the globe” Mezzadra and Neilson (2013, 183) conceptualized these configurations as “assemblages of power,” which often “bring together and even combine different forms of sovereign, disciplinary, and biopower in distinct and highly contextual formations” (ibid., 195). Importantly, Foucault stressed that “there is not a succession of law, then discipline, then security, but that security is a way of making the old armatures of law and discipline function in addition to the specific mechanisms of security” (Foucault 2009, 10). Within the field of organization studies, this realization of a productive interplay between different dispositives has led to an analytical approach called “dispositional analysis,” which according to Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning (2016, 274) is particularly useful for “focusing on the appearance of certain social dispositions or inclinations and […] articulating the way these arrangements affect social interaction and organizational behavior.” The approach has been employed, for example, to explain the responses of care workers to organizational changes aimed at increasing the efficiency of (elderly) care services in Denmark, thereby highlighting “the dispositional arrangements that conditioned the actions of care workers” (Villadsen 2021, 492). We suggest it is also helpful to understand the dispositional arrangements that condition British social workers to effectively become border guards.

The British Approach to Irregular Migration: “Go Home or Face Arrest,” or At Least Face Destitution

Despite substantial efforts to increase the state's capacity to remove irregular migrants from its territory, the British government—just like any other liberal government—faces significant legal and practical barriers when it comes to deportation (Gibney 2008; Ellermann 2010), especially of migrant families. And unlike many of their counterparts in other—particularly Southern—European countries, British governments have traditionally been reluctant to instead resort to regularization ⁴ (Kraler 2009). To increase the number of returns, irregular migrants are also being encouraged to leave the country via so-called “assisted voluntary return” (AVR) programs offering practical support and financial assistance to facilitate return to the country of citizenship. While these programs are officially portrayed as a more “humane,” “cost-effective,” and “sustainable” alternative to enforced removal (IOM 2018), the returns they produce are hardly ever truly voluntary (Webber 2011; Cleton and Chauvin 2020).

During one month in the summer of 2013, the British government ran a widely criticized advertising campaign across six London boroughs to promote its AVR program. In addition to leaflets, posters, and newspaper adverts, it included two billboard vans publicly conveying a three-fold message (see Travis 2013): “In the UK illegally?”—which echoes the codifying logic of law; “go home or face arrest”—reflecting the prescriptive and confining logic of discipline; and the offer to “text HOME for free advice and help with travel documents,” which matches the facilitative element of the security logic. By October 2013, according to the UK Home Office's (2013a, 4) official evaluation report, a total of 60 “voluntary departures” were believed to have resulted from this campaign, but particularly the van advertisements—which only led to 11 of the 60 returns (ibid.)—received a lot of criticism, ultimately leading the home secretary to admit that it had been “too much of a blunt instrument” (cit. in Travis 2013).

A more common (and less visible) way of trying to increase the likelihood of “voluntary departure” among irregular migrants is to make their everyday lives more difficult by undermining their social and economic relations (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010; Walsh 2014) and curtailing their access to basic rights and services (Spencer and Hughes 2015). Already in 2012, then Home Secretary Theresa May officially declared the government's aim to “create here in Britain a really hostile environment for illegal migration” (Kirkup and Winnett 2012). To achieve this, the ensuing Immigration Act of 2014 pursued three main objectives—which again mirror Foucault's prototypical dispositives: “to make it (i) easier to identify illegal immigrants” (law), “(ii) easier to remove and deport illegal immigrants” (discipline), and “(iii) more difficult for illegal immigrants to live in the UK” (security) (Home Office 2013b, 2). Concrete measures included an obligation for private landlords and public welfare providers to check the immigration status of their tenants, patients, and clients; and a prohibition on banks to open accounts for migrants in irregular situations. According to a senior government official (quoted in Williams 2020, 53), “[o]ne of the attractions of the hostile environment policies was that [they] could reach where enforcement couldn’t otherwise reach,” including public and private institutions. To increase irregular migrants’ risk of destitution and their marginalization from society—neither of which automatically results from a lack of immigration status alone—this part of the population had to be actively excluded not only from the labor market but also other potential sources of livelihood and assistance (Cvajner and Sciortino 2010).

Already before the hostile environment was announced, the Immigration and Asylum Act defined irregular migrants as having No Recourse to Public Funds (NRPF), and thereby extended the binary distinction drawn by immigration law into the sphere of welfare provision. The legal framework only prescribes very few and narrowly defined situations in which irregular migrants can avail themselves of public assistance: For example, if they have minor children who are (about to become) destitute they might be eligible for support provided by the local authority (LA), which has a duty under the Children Act to ensure the welfare of every child in need within its jurisdiction (NRPF Network 2018). The national government does not reimburse these expenses and LAs are only allowed to support irregular migrants after a statutory case assessment has established that withholding support would result in a breach of the child's human rights. In other words, irregular migrants’ access to public support—even if funded from local budgets—always constitutes an exception from the general rule that demands their exclusion. According to one interviewee, a local welfare officer working in a North-London borough,

the purpose of that exclusion is to get the local authority to consider whether the individual or family can in fact leave the UK and therefore remove themselves from any human rights breach […] by returning to their country of origin, where they could access services as a citizen.

Seen from this perspective, LA support would clearly undermine the central government's effort to encourage return. Precisely in order to reduce this “incentive to remain”, the subsequent Immigration Act of 2016 specifically aimed to further restrict support for rejected asylum seekers and their dependents. Both central and local government support should strictly be limited “to those who are destitute and face a genuine obstacle to leaving the UK” (Home Office 2016a, 3). In a fact sheet explaining the planned legislation, the Home Office (2016b) emphasized that:

Case-law is clear that there is no general obligation on Local Authorities to accommodate illegal migrants who intentionally make themselves destitute by refusing to leave the UK when it is clear they are able to. These reforms will help Local Authorities to reflect that principle in their approach to destitute families and others without immigration status.

A simplified assessment process should make it easier for LAs to discharge their support duties toward this client group. In spite being presented as a way to “help” LAs to reduce the number of people in their support (and thus the pressure on their budgets), the reform received widespread criticism and resistance from voluntary sector organizations and local governments, which ultimately prevented it from entering into force (Home Office 2015). In fact, a growing body of evidence suggests that cutting off support rarely leads to “voluntary departure” but rather drives migrants further underground (Crawley, Hemmings, and Price 2011). The widespread criticism of the hostile environment approach peaked in 2018 after the so-called “Windrush scandal,” ⁵ which suddenly made very visible the wrong assumptions and appalling side-effects of this approach (Williams 2020). It not only caused the resignation of a home secretary but eventually also led the government to re-brand the “hostile environment” as “compliant environment.” The next section focuses on how this policy and the accompanying discourse shape the way individual social workers understand their role and perform their function within this environment.

Making Social Workers Create “Hostility,” or At Least “Compliance”

Whenever a social worker deals with a client whose immigration status is irregular (or unclear), they must somehow manage the contradictions between their professional obligations and those imposed by immigration law (Cuadra and Staaf 2014; Furman et al. 2012; Park and Bhuyan 2012; Vrabiescu 2017). At least on paper, the former will often trump the latter, as a senior officer for accommodation and immigration at a local council near London explained in an interview:

My lead legislation isn’t immigration or housing, it's the Children Act. So, that child's parents may be subject to immigration control, but I still have a duty to children, if I have a child in need in my area. That makes my job a little bit easier to dispense […] because actually, if I get pulled to the High Court, which I have been, I don’t get asked about immigration law [… but] about the Children Act.

Such legal contradictions and the underlying professional values can thus keep social workers and other street-level bureaucrats from effectively participating in immigration control, and they provide a justification for individual or collective resistance. In the British context, as we will show in the following, these contradictions seem to have largely been overcome through a combination of three decisive governmental moves: the shifting of financial burden to LAs; the linking of migrants’ destitution with their irregularity; and the framing of their expulsion as “voluntary return.” By analyzing each of these moves from the perspective of social workers and other implementing actors, we show how they all rely on a productive interplay of different modalities of power.

Shifting Costs of Irregular Migration to Local Authorities

Since the early 1980s, neoliberal reforms of the British welfare state brought substantial cuts to public welfare spending (Kus 2006) and following the 2008 financial crisis the central government significantly reduced funding for LAs (Hastings et al. 2015). Both have increased the pressure on individual welfare workers to help “resolve” the problem of irregular residence, as an immigration advisor working at a Citizens’ Advice Bureau in South-London noted:

[Social workers] are put under extreme pressure because of the extreme cuts. I think that creates a certain atmosphere. And my understanding of a social worker, a few years ago, pretty naïve, was someone who helps people… who checks people are alright; but as I say, it seems […] that they are grinding these people [irregular migrants] to get statuses because they want to save money.

In one London Borough the annual cost of supporting a total of 278 NRPF-cases reached more than six million pounds by 2014, compared to around £150,000 in the years before 2008 (Lewisham Council 2014). Not only the number of NRPF-claims had increased “dramatically,” but also the average time it took to resolve these cases, which was partly due to the slow immigration decision-making by the Home Office (HO) (ibid.). This drives welfare bureaucrats and professionals to question even more the deservingness of irregular migrant families and to treat their claims as problematic and at least potentially illegitimate, as the account of an NGO practitioner (Children's Society) indicates:

If [the HO] are taking four years to decide and the person isn’t able to access any services in the meantime, nor to access benefits or work, then that's gonna fall on the LA. And I think there is an incentive in a way for the LA to inform the HO about a person who is ‘appeal rights exhausted’, because then they would speed up removal and [the LA] won’t have to support them anymore.

While LAs are not reimbursed by central government for supporting NRPF-cases, more specific funding was made available to LAs in 2016 under the so-called Controlling Migration Fund, which officially had a double aim: to “help local authorities mitigate the impacts of recent migration” and to “support [them] in tackling illegal migration” (MHCLG 2018, 4). According to a senior advisor at the Local Government Association, “that was the only route in which councils could access central government money to support asylum seekers, both whilst they were here and in terms of making that [return] decision.” This funding reflects the principle that as soon as asylum seekers become irregular migrants (because their claim for international protection is rejected) the response to their destitution should no longer be public support but return to their country of citizenship. Although not directly imposed on individual social workers (but the organizations they work for) this conditionality contributes to the same “atmosphere” that dispositions social workers to primarily see and treat their clients as either “regular” or “irregular” rather than on the basis of their concrete needs; and thus, to approach their destitution as a matter of immigration status.

Linking Destitution to Irregularity

This direct conflation of some local residents’ destitution with their immigration status constitutes the second governmental move. Here, the NRPF condition also fulfills an important discursive function by reminding social workers that it is because of their irregularity that these clients should not benefit from public spending. This seemingly clear-cut exclusion not only hides the fact that irregular migrants are still entitled to other fundamental public services (like compulsory education and basic healthcare), but it also generates uncertainty among professionals about the exact scope of the exclusion and the legal basis for making exceptions from it. The experience of a social worker at the Children's Society demonstrates this:

I still hear all the time from [LAs’] Duty and Assessment teams that ‘oh no, no, we can’t support them, they are NRPF’; and when [we] say, ‘well, that's not correct! You need to look into it and do a human rights assessment’, they don’t know what we’re talking about.

While in everyday practice, individual social workers retain a significant level of discretion, the tremendous financial pressure and overall environment in which their case-assessments and decisions must be made render inclusionary interpretations of the access rules increasingly unlikely. The following account of a social worker at a South-London council clearly reflects both aspects:

There's a lot of … opportunity for discretion and for interpretation, and people can be lucky and perhaps access somebody who is in a good mood that day and who might feel like allowing them access to something without perhaps probing so deeply. But more generally it seems that increasingly people are meeting gatekeepers who are very worried about not exceeding what they are allowed to give and very concerned about making sure that all the procedures are very strictly adhered to, and that can result in people being excluded from a service or a provision to which in fact they were entitled.

In the cases she refers to, the outcome is a level of exclusion that even exceeds what is formally prescribed by immigration law: the milieu created by scarce financial resources and a hostile political discourse dispositions social workers to use both their professional discretion and disciplinary power in a way that reinforces the legal division between regular and irregular migrants and is much more in line with immigration law than welfare legislation.

Importantly, the conflation of migrants’ destitution with their irregularity not only shapes individual practices but also triggers responses at the organizational level (Schweitzer 2020). As the representative of the Children's Society indicated, many social service departments have changed their organizational structure to deal more effectively with claims for assistance made by irregular migrants:

Certain social service departments now have NRPF-teams and […] whereas I would dispute that that makes them better at judging whether the child is in need or not, they at least know a bit more about the immigration situation, and so they seem a little… they are less reluctant to get involved in it.

Having such a team helps LAs to more consistently apply the complex rules and more efficiently manage internal referrals; but it also allows for more effective gatekeeping and is thus seen as a way to reduce spending (Lewisham Council 2014). Whereas UK immigration law places an explicit duty on LAs to inform the HO when irregular migrants request their support (NRPF Network 2018), the widespread creation of NRPF-teams ⁶ did not require any legal obligation but happened autonomously, thus reflecting the logic of security.

Yet another element that facilitates the involvement of social workers in controlling irregular migration is the so-called NRPF Connect database, a computerized system set up (in 2014) and maintained by a nationwide network of LAs. It enables direct exchange of information—including live immigration status checks—around individual NRPF-cases between the HO and the responsible LA. Like the creation of NRPF-teams, the use of this database has not been ordered by central government but was initiated by LAs themselves and is presented as benefiting both sides. LAs even pay an annual fee of currently at least £3,030 ⁷ for using this system while the HO contributes to its maintenance. According to the NRPF Network (2016, 2), it allows “[f]lagging local authority involvement on Home Office systems […] so the case can be prioritized” as well as “informing local authorities” when supported individuals or families receive a final negative decision on their immigration claim, “thereby allowing local authorities to consider the exclusions” (emphasis added) prescribed by immigration law.

While these changes in organizational structure and practice have made social service departments “better” at excluding irregular migrants, this has certainly not turned all social workers against this client group. As many interviewees were keen to emphasize, most social care practitioners have no interest in helping to deport people but rather tend to see the solution in regularization. ⁸ The following quotes of (1) a care assistant working in North-London, and (2) a senior advisor at the Local Government Association, illustrate this:

(1) So, [as a care assistant] you’re quite involved and kind of helping them, you know, in any way. It's like… you know that they don’t want to go back home. So, you… want that to be accepted, and that they can stay here, because they want to stay here.

(2) And I think there's something about the fact that the social work role is to be an advocate for that person, as well. And when you can’t advocate for the fact that the return is the best route for them, because you don’t know what the consequences of that return will be, it's hard to advocate for that.

These quotes clearly reflect the above-mentioned contradictions and show how social workers struggle with them not just as professionals but also on a personal level. At the same time, the fact that NRPF Connect is nowadays used by almost all LAs in London suggests that its alleged benefits are also embraced by many social workers who in principle oppose the government's efforts to remove their clients from the UK. This is where the third governmental move comes in.

Framing Irregular Migrants’ Departure as “Assisted Voluntary Return”

The fact that every return reduces social workers’ caseload and takes budgetary pressure from their organization is a strong incentive for collaborating with the HO, as a local welfare officer explained:

The HO will provide information about whether there is a barrier in place for removal; that's really what we are looking for in the information from them. If there is no barrier to removal, you could […] do a child-in-need assessment and a human rights assessment to offer tickets home […]. But if there is a barrier in place […] you are not going to be able to discharge your social services duties by offering tickets home.

This statement also illustrates that return is now part of the assessment process and how framing it as an “offer” can help social workers to perceive and present it as something that is in their clients’ own best interest. In addition, the close relationship that social workers often develop with their clients puts them in a good position to promote “voluntary return.” Paradoxically, however, making them part of the “hostile environment” has undermined this position, as explained by a representative of Refugee Action who for several years had led the UK's AVR program Choices:

Without the hostile environment, people would be able to have some trusting conversations with social workers, schools, people like that. But the hostile environment… what it did is it stripped every source of support away from someone [who is in an irregular situation].

[Interviewer: Could they be potential partners in relation to AVR…?]

Yes, exactly. Exactly: they’re critical, critical partners to it. But what the hostile environment did is it turned the social workers from partners into enforcement officers, essentially. So, now… no one can even talk to a social worker, to a school, to a doctor… That hostile environment was pervasive.

As expected, none of the social workers and welfare bureaucrats interviewed openly acknowledged to be part of a hostile environment, nor did they explicitly favor or try to justify the deportation of any of their clients. While this might reflect both a selection and social-desirability bias, it was striking that at least some of them did consider AVR as a viable option that could benefit both their clients and their organizations. The following statements of (1) the head of a regional Strategic Migration Partnership, and (2) a service manager at a North-London council exemplify this perception:

(1) Everyone wants the best outcome for those people, but similarly they are in limbo and need to have a… a more long-term solution to their problem. And voluntary return is one of those things for consideration within that. So, I think, you know, Social Care [practitioners] will look at that.

(2) They sell it in terms of cost saving as well, you know, it's all around that, I think. That's the big incentive for local authorities to promote voluntary return, because… you know, your numbers are going to go down.

When asked more specifically about their views on, and potential involvement in AVR, many interviewees described it as “better than living in destitution” and “the only option” they can really offer to certain clients; but they sometimes also challenged the official framing of such returns as “voluntary.” The following accounts of two social workers reflect these sentiments:

Families under the care of people like me and my service… for them it's not voluntary. It's literally the end of the road. And the problem is, if you then don’t take that option to secure the welfare of your child, you come up against people like me that will say that as a parent, you’re not making the right choice. And that sounds horrible. [But] my job is to protect the welfare of a child. So, if you’re deciding, ‘okay, we’re going to live on the streets and my child will sleep in the car’… I won’t allow you to do that. And I have the power to remove your child [take it into care], if I think you’re going to treat them in a manner that is negative. So, they have to make the right decision for the child, not for themselves.

[If] there is no other option, you clearly appraise them of the risks of staying in the UK without support, and you clearly outline to them why voluntary return is better than enforced return. You know, I think that detail is kind of missing. They [other social workers] often say, ‘Oh, yeah, I had that conversation, but he didn't want to do it’. And I think that that's not a good conversation. I think you need to be much firmer about, you know, saying, ‘actually, it is my professional opinion that you should take this route, in this circumstance, for this reason’.

Both statements describe situations where advocating for a “voluntary return” clearly constitutes a piece of professional advice rather than just a well-meant offer. Such advice is underpinned by a professional assessment and can be reinforced by the sanctioning mechanisms that social workers have at their disposal, whereby the social worker's office can become a disciplinary space. The explicit threat of taking an irregular migrant's child into LA care does not mean that the social worker puts migration control over child protection, but that the two objectives apparently converge. Notably, return thereby seems to become the solution to both: the family's irregularity and the child's destitution. This correlation between voluntary return practices and child protection concerns has also been identified in other contexts including Belgium (Van Osch 2022) and Spain (Vrabiescu 2017). Ultimately, the two quotes also show that if a social worker wants to convey the message in a convincing way, they certainly can; but also, that there remains significant room for individual discretion and agency. While some social workers very actively push irregular migrants to return “voluntarily,” others merely mention this option to their clients without turning it into explicit professional advice. This variability in everyday practice indicates that while the three governmental moves have not only facilitated but also clearly encouraged the participation of social workers in immigration control, they do not completely determine the nature, nor the extent, of this involvement.

Discussion

Social workers’ views on, and perceptions of, (irregular) migration are very diverse. As individual citizens, they are not necessarily more opposed to, nor in favor of, restrictive immigration policies than other people (Park and Bhuyan 2012; Cuadra and Staaf 2014); but as professionals, they have often been described as opposing immigration-related welfare restrictions and supporting the extension of at least basic social protection measures to irregular migrants (e.g., Borrelli 2024; Bruzelius, Ratzmann, and Reiss 2023; Furman et al. 2012). More generally, organization research suggests that any change in organizational practice that goes against the professional values of the people who would have to make it effective will face significant resistance (e.g., Villadsen 2021). So why has the reconstitution of British social workers into border guards been so successful?

We have tried to answer this question through a dispositional analysis of the legal-political context and everyday practices of public social service provision to migrant families living irregularly in London. Providing social and financial assistance to these families undermines the British governments’ efforts to make their stay in the country so uncomfortable that they rather accept assistance for a so-called “voluntary” return. The very idea of creating such “hostile environment” for a certain (administrative) category of people clearly reflects the logic of discipline and that of security, but it also relies on the logic of law to provide the underlying distinction between regular and irregular migrants. After all, the environment was meant to be hostile only for the latter, while not affecting anyone else, and especially not British citizens. What the “Windrush scandal” so painfully proved was precisely the government's over-reliance on this distinction and its failure—whether intended or unintended (see e.g., Bawdon 2019) —of translating it into enforcement practices that only hurt “illegal” subjects. As noted in the official review report: “an incorrect assumption was made […] that those who were in the country without the ability to demonstrate [their legal residence] with specific documents were here unlawfully” (Williams 2020, 12).

We have shown that the Immigration Act of 2014, which introduced many of the measures that made this environment hostile, explicitly combined the legal, disciplinary, and security dispositives, both in policy rhetoric and practice; and that the same combination of dispositional logics is also visible in the concrete artifacts used, such as the infamous billboard vans advertising the AVR program. Foucault himself once described the dispositive as “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, law, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic proportions—in short: the said as much as the unsaid” (Foucault 1980a, 194 cit. in Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning 2016, 278). Our in-depth analysis covers both discursive and practical aspects of social workers’ engagement with this client group; and it highlights three governmental moves that played a crucial role in the production of the social worker as border guard. The first two moves—the shifting of financial burden to LAs and the linking of destitution to irregularity—disposition social workers to more strictly assess the deservingness of those clients who are also irregular migrants. While most social workers are still genuinely concerned about the well-being of all their clients, both the financial pressure and the official branding of irregular migrants as having “NRPF” (because of their irregularity) makes immigration status an important factor in their assessment and processing of individual cases. Sorting out the immigration situation of these clients thus becomes a reasonable concern for social workers and to do so, they must collaborate closely with the HO. This collaboration is being facilitated by new technologies (like the NRPF Connect database) as well as changes in organizational practices and structures (like the establishment of NRPF-teams). All this, together, creates the work environment and more general “atmosphere” in which social workers “are grinding these people to get statuses,” as one interviewee called it. This is a good example for what Jones (2013) called the “conduct of conduct of conduct,” whereby it is primarily the logic of security (supported by law) that characterizes the power relation between government and social workers, whereas the latter then exercise a much more disciplinary power over their irregular migrant clients.

Especially in cases where the legal framework seems to leave very little chance for regularization, the third governmental move becomes relevant: the framing of irregular migrants’ departure as “assisted” and “voluntary.” This allows social workers to perceive and present their clients’ return to the country of citizenship as being in their own best interest and thereby clearly reflects the dispositional logic of security. In fact, by presenting return as a choice between forced removal and a “voluntary” and government-assisted move, the facilitative element of the security logic combines with the prescriptive logic of discipline, since without a sufficiently realistic threat of deportation very few people actually choose AVR (Webber 2011; Cleton and Chauvin 2020). The framing of return as an “offer” that social workers can make to their clients hides the disciplinary character of this measure and dispositions social workers to actively encourage their clients' return as the only way to avoid both destitution and the potentially traumatizing experience of deportation. They thereby participate in what Cleton and Chauvin (2020, 299) described as “rituals of freedom,” which are necessary to “ensure the interpretation of conduct as voluntary.” And also here, it is the interplay between different dispositional logics that puts social workers in the right position and condition to promote return instead of providing support. The message that they pass on to their clients is essentially the same as that on the billboard vans advertising “free advice and help” to those “in the UK illegally” and therefore having to “go home or face arrest”—only that social workers can present it in a much more convincing way. This also provides a good example of how voluntariness is used as “a technology of migration governance” that can “change the quality of relations between actors of the migration regime, aid the implementation of policies, and shift peoples’ perceptions and expectations of contemporary bordering processes,” as Schweitzer, Humphris, and Monforte (2022, 2) have argued.

Ultimately, our analysis also shows that the different dispositional logics can also work against each other. This became most apparent in the statement of the former head of the AVR program who lamented that by turning social workers into “enforcement officers” the hostile environment policy had destroyed the trust that migrant families used to have in them, and without which they are much less able to convince these families to at least consider return as a potential solution. Seen from the perspective of dispositional analysis, the security and disciplinary logics come into conflict here, rather than working together. In practice, it means that social workers cannot be expected to simultaneously threaten and persuade their clients to behave in a particular way. This finding indicates that dispositional analysis could also be fruitfully employed to better understand and explain inefficiencies in policy implementation, and/or to identify concrete potentials for internal resistance and contestation. By conceptualizing the underlying transformations of organizational practices and professional subjectivities as the outcome of a more or less productive interplay between different modalities of power, dispositional analysis leaves room for individual agency and decision-making ⁹ . As Raffnsøe, Gudmand-Høyer, and Thaning (2016, 283) argued, it thereby “permits the detection of immanent tendencies to resist and articulate how they contribute to shaping organizational order and making it dynamic, but also fragile and precarious.” While in this article we have tried to explain an absence of resistance, the same approach might also prove useful for analyses focusing on individual or institutional attempts to challenge exclusionary policies.

Conclusion

The production of the social worker as border guard requires a substantial transformation of organizations and professional subjectivities. This transformation has not simply been prescribed or imposed by the government but instead emerged from the interplay of different dispositional logics and mechanisms that we have traced through the levels of policy, organization, and individuals. The social workers we foreground do not simply respond to legislative changes that aim to make their work more “effective” while being at odds with their professional ethics, like in the case analyzed by Villadsen (2021). Instead, they are dispositioned to actively contribute to those very changes. Rather than resisting the exclusion of irregular migrant families or inventing circumvention strategies like those that Bruzelius, Ratzmann, and Reiss (2023) found in Germany, local social service departments in the UK have developed strategies that make it easier for individual professionals to evade even those very limited statutory responsibilities that they still have towards destitute families in irregular situations. Even if they are doing their best to make use of all legally available paths to regularization and the most “humane” forms of return, social workers and their organizations have become part and parcel of an explicitly exclusionary governance of irregular migration. By connecting organization research with critical migration and border studies our analysis of this development contributes to a better understanding of the everyday practices and organizational modalities of contemporary migration control within liberal-democratic states.