Governing poverty and migration in European nation-states – keywords revisited: Postscript

Abstract

Taken together these essays reveal both synergies and contradictions between and within immigration and welfare policies. Several common themes emerge. Firstly, while access to the welfare state is an important signifier of membership, in practice claiming certain state benefits is accompanied by suspicion, surveillance and stigma. The good citizen is a worker citizen. Secondly, the importance of the welfare state in putting the nation into the nation-state: the normative national community imagined as the rightful subject of welfare states is racialised and classed. Thirdly, deservingness functions in both welfare states and immigration regimes to prioritise victimhood rather than rights and redistribution.

As all these contributions acknowledge, migrants and citizens are legal and social constructions. They are also normative – the ‘migrant’ is socially imagined (and often researched as) racialised and/or poor, as a person whose presence is a problem. A US banker living in Frankfurt may be subject to immigration controls, but she would not be the kind of person conjured by the word ‘migrant’. The citizen too is a normative category, with its origins partly in land/property ownership, partly in revolutionary uprising (CITIZENSHIP). Today citizenship continues as a site of political struggle, and as a legal status brings with it a portfolio of rights. The citizenship regime is now global, but the rights attendant on citizenship vary considerably both by and within states. The ‘Criminal’ for example, may be a citizen, but nevertheless subject to extreme deprivation, even execution. Perhaps the one shared global citizens’ ‘right’ (if that is indeed what it is) is the right not to be deported from one's state of citizenship – though of course in certain circumstances suspected criminals may be extradited. Socio-spatial control is a ‘purposeful governing strategy’ that is both global and national (BANISHMENT).

In many European countries post WW2, the expansion of citizenship rights to social citizenship and a basic safety net was a significant achievement by national workers’ organisations (CITIZENSHIP). The welfare state gives normative value and substance to legal citizenship, but while these rights are described as premised on universalism, albeit the universalism of the liberal able-bodied male subject, this was a nationalist universalism that naturalised nation state borders (WELFARE STATE; SOCIAL SOLIDARITY; BANISHMENT) and normalised the differentiation mechanisms of immigration controls (DISCIPLINE). The illusion of this universalism is increasingly exposed and examining immigration and welfare states together is imperative if we are to understand mechanisms of differential inclusion and challenge the reification of the categories of migrant and of citizen. This in turn requires us not only to think more expansively about cross border migration, but also more broadly about mobilities within states. Among the disciplining measures of welfare policies are mobilisation via travel to work requirements and immobilisation by requiring claimants to remain at the same address (DISCIPLINE; BANISHMENT).

Reading these papers together reveals both synergies and contradictions between and within immigration and welfare policies. Several common themes emerge. Firstly, while access to the social safety net is taken as the apogee of citizenship and serves as an important signifier of national membership, in practice claiming certain state benefits is accompanied by suspicion, surveillance and stigma (SURVEILLANCE AND SUSPICION; SOCIAL SOLIDARITY AND DESERVINGNESS; DISCIPLINE). The good citizen (as opposed to the legal citizen) is a worker citizen (CITIZENSHIP; WELFARE GOVERNANCE; DISCIPLINE). While it ostensibly seems to be that this is not the case for all welfare benefits and that pensions for example are not stigmatised in the same way as social assistance, nevertheless what matters is that the claimant must endeavour to demonstrate that they are or have been a working-kind-of-person (Zatz and Boris, 2014). This is particularly visible in the case of EU migrants, whose right to work is an EU citizenship right, but whose right to social assistance can be highly restricted (WELFARE STATE; BANISHMENT). For third country nationals, most obviously asylum seekers, but other statuses too, access to work is a privilege and they may be denied the ‘the right to work’. However, the ‘right to work’ is not synonymous with the right to have a job and citizens’ ‘right to work’ does not, in contemporary liberal democracies, mean that the state has a duty to provide work. The ‘right to work’ is made visible through its denial to migrants rather than through its enjoyment by citizens. Close attention to the welfare state exposes immigration policy's sleight of hand that turns a citizen's duty to work into a migrant's (lack of) right to work.

In European countries the welfare state is an important way that the nation is put into the nation state. That is, while the legal status of citizenship is the key that unlocks access to the welfare state, it is the normative national community who are imagined as the rightful recipients. This national community is racialised – as manifest in the experiences of Roma communities across Europe (CITIZENSHIP; SOCIAL SOLIDARITY; WELFARE STATE). This has been the case since their inception, and this racialization continues today both for negatively racialised citizens and for migrants ; (BANISHMENTWELFARE GOVERNANCE; DISCIPLINE; Ashiagbor, 2021). The migrant is viewed as an object of suspicion, an outsider who is a risk to the national welfare state. This is not only because they are imagined to have not sufficiently contributed, or to be abusing the system, but also because migration is presented as undermining the social solidarity that welfare states depend on (SURVEILLANCE AND SUSPICION; SOLIDARITY AND DESERVINGNESS). However, as John Holmwood trenchantly observes: ‘The point is not that immigration has now begun to undermine solidarities, but that solidarities were formed on a racialized politics of colonial encounters’ (Holmwood, 2016: 159). This collection contributes to these analyses by drawing attention to the fact that the ‘migrant’ is classed as well as racialized. The governance of both migration and welfare state is the governance of the poor. As nation renders race/ethnicity respectable, so ‘skill’ stands in for class, and even if the migrant can pass as White, the ‘low-skilled’ migrant is of a different kind of Whiteness to their ‘high-skilled’ compatriot (Anderson, 2022). The imbrication of race and class and relation of both to colonialism is the second common theme of the collection: the racialised and classed nature of welfare states are rendered peculiarly visible in relation to migrants, but the consequences are not confined to migrants. Not at all.

Deservingness is one of the keywords, but it is also the third theme that runs through the contributions. Arguably, ideas of deservingness have been foundational to contemporary migration policy: there is the refugee/economic migrant distinction, now ‘refined’ to distinguish between the bogus asylum seeker and the genuinely vulnerable refugee. But also, and related to the previous point above, the highly skilled, ‘brightest and the best’, and the low skilled. The functioning of deservingness in terms of public support of social policies has been analytically refined with reference to the welfare state, and there is now an extensive literature on the so-called CARIN criteria (control, attitude, reciprocity, identity and need) as a measure of popular support for the targets of welfare policies (CITIZENSHIP; GOVERNANCE; SOLIDARITY AND DESERVINGNESS). There is growing interest in how migrants figure in this framework, in terms of access to welfare (e.g., Nielsen et al., 2020), but also in terms of access to settlement (De Coninck et al., 2022). These essays contribute to a growing body of work examining how the two deservingness frames of welfare state and immigration map on to one another, and which migrants are seen as deserving of social assistance. Thinking in terms of deservingness prioritises a kind of victimhood rather than equalising rights, and the welfare state as a safety net rather than a redistributive mechanism. It contributes to justifying, not only the exclusion of non-nationals, but also the shift from national universalism to distribution on the basis of preparedness to work. The ethics of deservingness are a poor replacement for the politics of justice.