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Abstract

In this article we focus on contemporary processes of social differentiation and exclusion at the intersection of migration policy and welfare governance. The keyword pair looks at bureaucratic practices, their justifications, and their consequences for non-citizen subjects’ paths and moves on to theorise about the permeation of these practices into society. We discuss the effects of the suspicion-surveillance nexus on the observed body and mind and how they operate in support of increasingly intrusive practices. Rather than debating the legality of such practices and the inequalities and power relations they imply, we focus on the possibilities of control as discourses become technologised.

Keywords

institutionalisation migration control nexus suspicion surveillance

Contextualising (institutionalised) suspicion and surveillance

Suspicion and surveillance have been linked to policing and criminal law (e.g., grounds of suspicion for controls, see Schwell, 2014), to political agendas within a securitarian framing of international relations (Huysmans, 2006), and to national surveillance techniques used, for example, during the Cold War (Buzan et al., 1998). Yet, both terms are also relevant on a more mundane level, particularly in the control of individuals within the migration regime that governs non-citizens’ claims to presence, or within welfare governance that assesses individuals’ eligibility for support (Bloch et al., 2014; Fletcher and Wright, 2017). We argue that within the logics of racialised neoliberal states, both fields – welfare and migration control – are intimately connected to and function based on a logic of institutionalised suspicion that goes hand in hand with surveillance techniques to differentiate between those who are deserving and undeserving, and therefore between those who are eligible and those who are not.

Within migration control, suspicion has become ‘a fundamental prism through which asylum seekers are perceived and treated [affecting] the daily work of the agents’ (Kobelinsky, 2015, 68), such as state actors (see Alpes and Spire, 2014). Indeed, asylum seekers – and all categories of racialised, or in other ways discriminated, poor others – are put through an ‘incommensurable circle of suspicion’ (Lundberg, 2020) by national migration regimes, displaying a culture of disbelief (Borrelli, 2020a; Khosravi, 2009) and treating migration as a source of existential threat to the identity and cohesion of European states (Jubany, 2017). In response, various sets of surveillance measures have been put in place to appease the suspicious governmental gaze and to address doubts about the genuineness of asylum claims (Affolter, 2021; Kelly, 2012; Kobelinsky, 2015), allowing for increased documentation and questioning, often with the use of technologies that advance knowledge on the identity of foreign nationals (Aradau et al., 2021; Mountz et al., 2013; Torpey, 1999) or the spatial whereabouts of those deemed suspicious (e.g., via ankle monitors, see Bhatia, 2021).

The feeding of such suspicion by the media, state agencies, professionals, and politicians on the one hand and the increase in surveillance technologies at external borders (e.g., Frontex) or within states (Chambers et al., 2019; Topak, 2014) on the other, underlines the need to study ‘the correlation between these rationalizations via practical justifications and the (in)securitization practices of the actors’ (Bigo, 2014: 211). Importantly, in this understanding, suspicion needs to be cultivated to justify further control mechanisms, such as surveillance measures. Yet, both concepts are not new or exclusively directed at ‘the foreigner’. Parallel to the suspicious gaze and surveillance experienced by many non-citizens in their encounters with the migration regime (e.g., in the field of asylum), we find similar mechanisms embedded in the welfare state. Surveillance has for a long time existed in the form of censuses or household registration systems (Torpey, 1999), and practices of social rights are intimately linked to suspicion. In the United States, Ronald Reagan popularised the term ‘welfare queen’ in his 1976 electoral campaign, containing imagery of African American single mothers who scammed and abused the social system. As a politically salient term, it relegated the targets of this notion to ‘a specific social location determined by race, gender and class’ (Hayden Foster, 2008: 162), demonstrating the need for an intersectional perspective on suspicion and surveillance.

A significant but much-overlooked development is the transition towards the ‘digital welfare state’ (DWS), in which ‘social protection and assistance systems are increasingly driven by digital data and technologies used to automate, predict, identify, monitor, detect, target and punish’ (Alston, 2020). The DWS has been criticised for reversing the idea that the state is responsible for ensuring an adequate standard of living and for treating the individual not as a rights-holder but as an applicant who must show deservingness (Alston, 2019; 2020). Today, digital practices of surveillance are increasingly used to monitor potential abuse (Fletcher and Wright, 2017), with the effect that the DWS creates new forms of discrimination, exclusion, and inequality (Larasati et al., 2022).

Suspicion and surveillance are thus prevalent in both migration control and welfare administration, which are becoming intertwined (Gordon, 1985; Williams, 1987). Increasingly, public decision-makers, in particular those in welfare and migration government, rely on artificial intelligence as an ‘alleged techno-solutionist tool’ (Paul, 2022: 498; referring to Morozov, 2014) to, for instance, detect welfare or tax fraud or to recognise defects in asylum claim processing (see Paul, 2022: 497). We argue that the increased coupling of welfare and migration administrations (Lafleur and Mescoli, 2018; Nordling and Persdotter, 2021) leads to blurred boundaries of control, allowing for automated information and knowledge exchanges between the authorities entrusted with either the delivery of welfare benefits or the control and regulation of migration (Borrelli et al., 2021a, 2021b; Mantu and Minderhoud, 2023).

Yet, when it comes to suspicion and surveillance, most scholarly attention is directed at the asylum regime and the monitoring of (maritime) borders (Chambers et al., 2019; Kelly, 2012; Topak, 2014). We thus propose looking at the micro-interactions of suspicion and surveillance that lie at the intersection of social policy and migration governance beyond the asylum regime and study how ‘poor’ non-citizens are discriminated because of their class, race, and gender in the realm of foreign national and immigration law. We also consider the role of third actors that become part of a diversification of modes of surveillance (Bloch et al., 2014). Moreover, we point to the discriminatory character of algorithms and artificial intelligence and their racial or gender bias, given that they are human-made (Paul, 2022).

European states (cf. Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland) emphasise systematic control of non-citizens who ask for social assistance, which is linked to an intensified control of eligibility criteria in the sphere of social rights. Suspicion thus ‘surrounds practices of social rights [that] favor […] the realization of citizenship by eliminating the burdens of poverty’, and ‘social rights […] contribute to keeping the individual in a condition of subordination simply by participating in a system of social protection’ (Procacci, 2001: 60). Here, ‘stratified rights themselves create a climate of suspicion and surveillance’ (Morris, 2003: 81). While there is a general mistrust towards (potential) welfare claimants, certain sub-groups face more suspicion and consequently more intense monitoring. Here, the ‘poor migrant’ becomes a sine qua non suspect in the welfare-migration-suspicion and surveillance nexus.

Both welfare governance and migration control operate with suspicion, which allows for surveillance that is both generalised and geared towards specific interlinked categories of difference. The circularity of this discourse, where suspicion enables more surveillance, allows for an institutionalised doubtful position towards the applicant per se,¹ questioning the truthfulness of individual cases while reifying racialised groups (Wissink, 2021). The link between active citizenship and hard work intensifies the differentiation between citizen and non-citizen, it allows for the spread of suspicion towards poverty in general and migration in particular (Borrelli et al., 2021b), and forms a racialised neoliberal welfare model. From here, we discuss the institutionalisation of suspicion, which represents the core of an efficient surveillance system.

The institutionalisation of suspicion

Despite evidence to the contrary, the assumption that migrant groups abuse state-funded welfare more than others prevails in the media (e.g., Danaj and Wagner, 2021), in political debates, and across the public, especially when migrants arrive from poorer states (Hjorth, 2016). This negative attitude is often coupled with a chauvinistic stance towards welfare that attempts to limit support to an ‘in-group’, often citizens (see keyword ‘Welfare State’). This is nourished and legitimised by theoretical underpinnings and hypotheses. According to the welfare magnet thesis (Borjas, 1999), people move to countries due to their ‘generous’ welfare systems to draw social benefits rather than to work, engaging in ‘welfare migration’ or ‘social tourism’. The welfare burden thesis concerns the consequences of such immigration, claiming that migrants have a negative fiscal effect on the state in which they reside by contributing less to the tax and welfare system than they take out (Giulietti and Wahba, 2012). Multiple studies have discarded the welfare magnet and burden theses (Bonin et al., 2008; Ehata and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2017; Pedersen et al., 2008) and have, for instance, shown that migrants instead heavily curb rising welfare costs by working in the health sector (Williams, 1987). Still, just like other theories, such views are useful for explaining human behaviour from a state-centric perspective (cf. Kraler et al., 2015; Pfirter et al., 2021; Schinkel, 2018) and contribute to the institutionalisation of suspicion.

Didier Bigo (2002) has labelled processes of circular legitimisation of suspicion and surveillance as the ‘governmentality of unease’, which is ‘the result of the creation of a continuum of threats and general unease in which many different actors exchange their fears and beliefs in the process of making a risky and dangerous society’ (Bigo, 2002: 63). This perspective is insightful when analysing the co-constitution of suspicion and surveillance at the intersection of migration and welfare governance, in which fears of abuse, undeservingness, and belonging are continuously shaped by discursive formations and everyday practices by bureaucracies entrusted with the task of controlling access to resources, goods, and rights. Analysing the specific figure of ‘the poor migrant’ enables us to pinpoint these discursive formations and bureaucratic practices that penetrate and co-exist in welfare governance and migration control.

Examples of institutionalised suspicion and surveillance in political and legal discourses and practices

In many European states, the politicisation of migration in the context of welfare is intimately connected to the above-discussed welfare magnet or burden theses. The decision of the British people to leave the European Union in 2016 was largely fuelled by discontent towards EU free movement and accompanied by the message that the mobility of certain persons is undesirable and should be limited (Hobolt, 2016). European integration, intra-EU migration, and immigration from outside the EU, including illegalised immigration, were linked (Balch and Balabanova, 2017; Roos, 2019), using arguments based upon sovereignty and security to ‘take back control’ over immigration and the welfare system (Blauberger et al., 2021).

In other EU member states, such as Germany, support for EU free movement generally remains the main political message, yet ‘poverty migration’ is branded as problematic for EU mobility. Sandra Mantu (2018) argued that it remains unclear exactly who is targeted by such notions, since from a legal perspective, such discourses seem to involve a combination and conflation of mobile poor, economically inactive, poorly paid EU citizens, generally those from poorer member states. EU ‘poverty migration’ claims are a specific illustration of the welfare burden theory. The argument is that citizens from poor EU states move to benefit from the generous welfare systems of the richer EU states and that this movement is somehow abusive – both an abuse of free movement rights and an abuse of the destination state's welfare system – that ultimately endangers the prosperity of the state and of its national citizens. In 2014, for instance, the Bavarian party, CSU, in Germany accused primarily Romanians and Bulgarians of welfare fraud once they enjoyed full free movement: The party stirred up the debate with the slogan ‘Who lies flies’, thereby linking welfare and residence, and calling, inter alia, for restricted access and more cooperation between different authorities to detect fraud and abuse (Bayerische Staatskanzlei, 2014).

This political framing of EU mobility as suspicious, potentially abusive, and in need of surveillance can pave the way for a general welfare state retrenchment, reducing welfare benefits for everyone (for Sweden see Kazemi, 2021; for Switzerland see Tabin, 2005), or it can be part of a chauvinistic ‘quarantining’ strategy, i.e., to exclude migrants from welfare entitlement (Kramer et al., 2018). Legally, claims about the abuse of free movement rights have not yet found support in the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice. Instead, the Court has reacted to the political and public debates on ‘welfare migration’ by acknowledging that states are entitled to refuse benefits to economically inactive EU citizens and to terminate residence (Blauberger et al., 2018; Mantu, 2018). Potential residents are faced with a dilemma: to legally reside, they must have sufficient resources, and applying for social assistance to make ends meet raises suspicion, starts a case evaluation, and potentially leads to the termination of their residence, and even expulsion, if they are classified as lacking sufficient resources. A suspicious public gaze further impacts street-level bureaucrats in welfare authorities by supporting and legitimising their suspicion (Runfors et al., 2021), even more so when receiving restrictive signals on a political level through their superiors (Martinsen et al., 2019). As such, suspicion becomes institutionalised and supported by surveillance techniques that enable and legitimate state practitioners to monitor certain individuals.

As demonstrated in the keywords on Welfare Governance, and Social Solidarity and Deservingness, (European) welfare states have changed, departing from the ‘Keynesian’ framework towards neoliberal rationality (Dubois, 2014). Seeking to cut back on welfare expenditure by rationalising bureaucracy, they also keep an eye on individual conduct and welfare use to, for example, detect fraud (Bonvin and Nadai, 2012; Borrelli and Bochsler, 2020) and allow for a ‘moral assessment’ (Handler and Hasenfeld, 1991). Suspicions of welfare abuse and fraud have to be seen in light of this development: ‘While welfare use has always borne the stigma of poverty, it now also bears the stigma of criminality’ (Gustafson, 2009: 644). Surveillance, for its part, is a way to detect abuse and, at the same time, the consequence of suspicion. To organise and control populations, nation-states gather, accumulate, store, and control information. Surveillance thus becomes an ‘administrative’ (Giddens, 1987) or ‘disciplinary’ power in bureaucracies (Foucault, 1995).

Specific examples of the suspicion-surveillance nexus

On a bureaucratic level, the Dutch childcare allowance scandal illustrates how various markers of difference are operationalised and institutionalised using artificial intelligence as part of a suspicion-surveillance nexus. Between 2013 and 2019, the Dutch tax authorities wrongly accused an estimated 26,000 parents and caregivers of making fraudulent benefit claims, who were required to fully pay back benefits already received as a result. Central to the scandal was the use of a ‘risk classification model’ by the Dutch tax authority. Based on an algorithmic decision-making system that was designed to detect potential fraud, the nationality of the applicant – ‘Dutch’ or ‘non-Dutch’ – was one of the indicators used in the creation of risk profiles, with non-Dutch receiving a higher risk score. The tax authorities went even further by also using data on the dual ‘nationality’ of Dutch citizens to assess applications, although the criterion for assessing entitlement to child benefits is legal residence, not nationality (Dutch Data Protection Authority, 2020). Fed into this decision-making system, racial profiling in the administration of the Dutch welfare state had far-reaching consequences for parents and caregivers with non-Dutch backgrounds and low incomes. Many families ended up in financial hardship, bankruptcy, unemployment, home evictions, and divorce (Amnesty International, 2021). The scandal is an example of intersectional discrimination since the applicants’ low-income and social status, combined with their ‘foreignness’, were the markers used by the tax authority to signal them out for further investigation. A parliamentary inquiry into the affair concluded that fundamental principles of the rule of law had been violated by all branches of the Dutch state: the administration, the legislator, and the judiciary (Netherlands House of Representatives, 2020).

In Sweden, benefit cutbacks for unaccompanied migrant children have led to austerity in financial support for children and young people in terms of access to housing support in particular. Baharan Kazemi (2021) shows how the discursive construction of unaccompanied minors as different and dangerous enabled an intersection of social work and migration policy, implying surveillance of their daily routines and placing them in an inferior position for social workers, reducing their access to rights.

These cases illustrate the existing intersection between migration control and welfare governance, which is characterised by institutional suspicion, leading to surveillance practices – be they during direct interactions or via automated systems – that uncover intersectional discrimination. The cases also show how suspicion towards welfare benefit recipients was generalised and integral to the redrawing and scaling down of the Dutch and parts of the Swedish welfare state and policy. Yet, this generalised suspicion went hand in hand with processes of racialisation and surveillance targeting non-national applicants, or unaccompanied minors, who were characterised as prone to committing fraud. Racialisation and its normalisation through bureaucratic practices of suspicion and surveillance play an integral part in a racialised neoliberal state and in how population categories ‘are constantly being made in bureaucratic processes’ (Wissink, 2021: 257).

The Netherlands and Sweden are just two of the European states that are seeking to introduce technological ‘solutions’ that facilitate the systematic control of (non)-citizen welfare applicants. We find a system of increasingly close cooperation between welfare and immigration authorities. The generalised suspicion of welfare abuse is used to justify the introduction of surveillance systems that link different offices through automated data exchange (see Borrelli, 2019, 2020b; Borrelli et al., 2021a, 2021b; Kramer and Heindlmaier, 2021 on Germany; Mantu and Minderhoud, 2023 on EU citizens; Pfirter, 2019 on Switzerland). In some cases, there is a legal obligation to consult with the immigration authorities before deciding on welfare claims. Yet, there can also be differences between the ‘caring’ and the ‘punishing’ arms of the state: Not all welfare authorities further surveillance in the form of reporting obligations that link the welfare and residence spheres (Heindlmaier, 2018). In Germany, for instance, several municipalities rejected the call by the head of the German migration agency for all immigration authorities and municipalities to fingerprint asylum seekers and compare the data with the central register to detect welfare fraud (Deutsche Welle, 2017).

Conclusion: Effects and consequences of the suspicion-surveillance nexus

Suspicion (like doubt) occupies the space between the law and its application. In that sense, all judicial and policing systems of the modern state presuppose organized suspicion, incorporate margins of uncertainty. Suspicion is like an animal, ‘aroused’ in the subject […]. Suspicion initiates and is an integral part of an investigation, and the investigation ends when suspicion is put to rest – when a ‘reasonable’ person comes to a conclusion, one way or the other, on probable evidence. (Asad, 2004: 285)

The suspicious gaze directed towards non-citizens creates insecurities for those targeted (Borrelli et al., 2021b; Wilkes and Wu, 2019) and may have physical consequences. The enactment of suspicion through regular check-ins or via surveillance technologies exacerbates the emotional and physical pain and stress of ‘poor migrants’. Surveillance causes isolation, fuelling lethargy and depression (Bhatia, 2021). At the same time, state surveillance and suspicion also work on a moral level, imposing restrictions on asylum seekers relying on welfare support to buy food instead of cigarettes (Sales, 2002). Here, the monitoring of ‘needy’ migrants is outsourced to new actors of migration control, be they the supermarket staff or institutionalised in databases/algorithms established to detect potentially fraudulent claims.

Suspicion is also enacted through raids to uncover suspected ‘illegal work’, which often target and therefore discriminate against specific types of businesses. Potential tip-offs cause individuals to be more careful moving around (Bloch et al., 2014), trying to become invisible. They learn to navigate through and anticipate the ‘institutionalised stereotypes’ as well as suspicion in a way to circumvent surveillance (Nagy, 2016). The state's inherent suspicion and need to make people readable translates into heavy surveillance, which aims at identifying and detecting ‘unwanted others’ that ‘deserve’ to be deported. Similar to citizens that depend on welfare, poor migrants have to disclose their financial situations and much of their private lives for caseworkers to assess their eligibility. Hence, the more ‘needy’ someone becomes, the more prone they become to state control. Zachary Whyte (2011: 18) refers to a ‘myopticon’, a ‘near-sighted and partial system of surveillance practice, knowledges and sanctions, deployed as though it were panoptic’, where power lies more in the uncertainty and inability of those targeted to know where state power ends, causing frustration and debilitation.

As a consequence, benefit stigma or perceived ‘abuse’ may contribute to a non-take-up of benefits as migrants are aware of the suspicion and subsequent surveillance, or to differentiated assessments of in-work and out-of-work benefits on the (potential) claimant's side. This causes, as we observed, under-use instead of abuse or over-use of welfare benefits (see also Ehata and Seeleib-Kaiser, 2017; Schweyher and Burrell, 2019), which, after all, may be an intended administrative consequence and an effect of deportability (De Genova, 2002). Yet, already before becoming part of the welfare-migration-suspicion and surveillance nexus, the simple threat that a welfare application may erode residence rights may prevent migrants from engaging with the welfare state to escape ‘institutional visibility’ (see also Nagy, 2016) and bring them into precarious situations (Kramer and Heindlmaier, 2021; see also keyword ‘Banishment’). Especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, the need for firewalls between migration and welfare authorities regained salience since many migrants were reluctant to engage with public health and healthcare authorities for fear of immigration reprisals (Kumar et al., 2021; Mallet-Garcia and Delvino, 2021; Meier et al., 2021). Migrants’ distrust towards state authorities stems from their previous interactions with the ‘suspicious state’ and their awareness of being under surveillance. The pandemic has shown that social interactions based on suspicion and surveillance harm both migrants and society as a whole. COVID-19 outbreaks among migrant groups affect everyone, highlighting the negative consequences of these practices.

Besides the gruesome effects that suspicion and surveillance have on the observed body and mind, they operate in support of increasingly intrusive practices. Rather than debating the legality and effects of such practices and the inequalities and power relations they imply, discourses become technologised, focusing more on the possibilities of control.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by the nccr – on the move funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation grant 51NF40-182897.

Notes

Author biographies

Lisa Marie Borrelli works as Associate Professor at the Institute of Social Work (University of Applied Sciences and Arts Western Switzerland). Her research interests include social policies and migration governance, critical border regime studies and the anthropology of emotions and organisations. Among others, her work has appeared in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Public Administration, Geopolitics, and the Journal of Social Policy.

Anita Heindlmaier is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Vienna. She received her doctorate in political science from the University of Salzburg. Her research interests include free movement of persons and migration, social policies and labour conditions. Heindlmaier's work has appeared in, amongst others, the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, the Journal of European Public Policy, and the Journal of European Social Policy.

Sandra Mantu is Assistant Professor of Migration Law at the Faculty of Law, of the Radboud University in the Netherlands and co-managing editor of the European Journal of Migration and Law. Sandra's research and teaching focuses on EU citizenship, free movement of persons, equality, welfare state, gender, and nationality law.

Luca Pfirter is lecturer at the Laboratoire d'études des processus sociaux at the university of Neuchâtel. His research interests concern contemporary forms of governing doubts in upholding hierarchies and differenciations between humans; as well as elaborating connected processes of b/ordering.

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