The Moral Economy of Welfare: Bulgarian Roma Migrants Reclaiming Social Citizenship through Fraud

Abstract

This paper explores the constitution of a moral economy of welfare through acts of benefit fraud. The structural conditions of contemporary labour, citizenship, and migration regimes in Europe exclude large shares of workers from access to social citizenship and place them in a position of undeserving trespassers of the social contract. Drawing on the case of Bulgarian Roma engaged in precarious labour and short-term intensive mobility between Bulgaria and the Netherlands, I show how labour conditions in both countries and the structures of the welfare regimes effectively exclude them from access to social citizenship and confine them to the realms of informal work, thus putting them in a position of differential inclusion. The benefit fraud in this context has multiple interpretations—ranging from crime through a survival strategy to a claim to social justice. By mobilizing the idea of the moral economy of welfare, I seek to explain how migrants justify their actions not as transgression, but as a claim to social citizenship and a critique of an unjust social and economic order. In a moral economy of welfare, the migrants see themselves as deserving state support both by virtue of being citizens and of being good workers. Being excluded from proper welfare support is interpreted as a failure of both states. In this context, the fraud is framed in moral terms as an act of citizenship aiming to restore justice.

Ivanski, a small village in the northeast of Bulgaria, became infamous in early 2013 because of a social benefit fraud in the Netherlands organized by two of its villagers. What later became known as the Bulgarian Fraud (De Bulgarenfraude) ¹ in the Netherlands was a scheme of fraudulently applying for rent and healthcare benefits retroactively. The scheme started untangling when two Bulgarian Roma were accused of organizing the scheme for fake address registrations and rental agreements on false names in order to claim on their behalf housing subsidies, healthcare, and transport allowances from the Dutch state. The two defendants allegedly tricked many of their fellow villagers into the scheme in exchange for small amounts of cash in return. A year into it, one of the villagers received a letter from the Dutch authorities that he had to pay back 14,000 euros received fraudulently in social benefits. ² The case became a public scandal, involving various levels of actors, ranging from the local police of the nearby town of Shumen to the deputy mayor of Rotterdam. Eventually, a much larger scheme of social benefits fraud was uncovered in which many more migrants were claiming housing allowance, with forged address registrations.

The scandal escalated fast, producing competing interpretations of the incident and its moral side. Media outlets in Bulgaria and the Netherlands covered the case ³ ; the mayor of Rotterdam paid a visit to the village and discussed the issue with the local administration, the local government, and the local police; and the Dutch police got involved. The interpretations were morally loaded, holding accountable various agents—the Roma villagers, the local mediators, the Turkish intermediaries in the Netherlands, and social services in the Netherlands—but also the structural conditions of poverty and precarity. The diverging reactions all sought to draw lines of entitlement, deservingness, transgression, and responsibility through the lens of morality. Thus, the fraud case triggered a vocalization of the mechanisms for producing difference. Difference between good and bad citizens, deserving and undeserving subjects, welcome and unwelcome migrants created oppositions between states within the framework of the European Union (EU): responsible states taking care of their citizens versus irresponsible states neglecting their own citizens.

But one voice remained unheard in this battle for moral interpretations—the voice of the Roma migrants. What made them engage in the scheme? How did they justify and explain their actions? How do they interpret their position as workers and citizens and construct their own logic of a moral economy of welfare? In this paper, I trace how a benefit fraud came to signify a claim to social citizenship and a moral critique by those performing it of the unjust social and economic order. The Roma migrants in this paper see themselves as good workers and citizens who have been deserted by both states between which they spread their lives. Fraud is a way to restore justice in an unjust system of bureaucratic restrictions and extremely precarious working and living conditions. By justifying the fraud, they formulate a social critique. Their critique is complex and multidirectional, directed against the precarious living conditions in which they live as highly mobile workers and against the states that do not alleviate their suffering. It is a critique of unjust pay, precarious labour, migrant exploitation, bureaucratic restrictions that exclude mobile people, discrimination, poverty, and more. In other words, it is a critique of contemporary capitalism writ large. With their actions and the interpretation of these actions, they make a moral claim to the unjust labour market and the poorly functioning welfare states, and they construct a different moral economy of welfare from the one they face.

My ethnographic research took place in three villages in the Shumen region in the northeast of Bulgaria. I conducted unstructured and semi-structured interviews over a period of one year in 2013 and 2014 with villagers of active working age, most of whom are Roma. I have also conducted interviews with institutional actors like social workers and local government officials. The three villages are in close proximity to the town of Shumen and all have significant Roma populations, of whom large numbers are migrants. Due to the fact that I did not follow my respondents to their migration destinations, I based my understanding of their trajectories, their actions and their employed strategies on their own stories and narratives. I have not followed or observed their acts, but their interpretations and the way they talk about them and frame them within the contexts of their lives. My arguments are built around these interpretations, rather than on the observations of acts that can be defined as facts. At the same time, these acts and strategies are not simply stories told by the concrete respondents I talked to but have been described in other sources, like other scholarly texts and media. In addition, the saturation of empirical information from respondents from different localities and different positions was sought as a way to verify the stories. Above all, this article engages with the way actions and structural conditions are interpreted and the way actors position themselves and justify or explain their motives, which is a work of discourse. I use the respondents’ repetitive tropes of fairness and justice when describing securing certain types of social benefits through fraudulent means, to explain their understanding of systemic injustice, critique of the state, and understanding of their relations with the state. I take this further to conceptually frame their actions and their interpretations of their actions as acts of citizenship, which is an analytical move. This choice is discussed in more detail in the final section of the article.

In what follows, I first connect concepts of disaggregation of citizenship and precarization of labour with the moral economy framework and argue that the Roma migrants construct a different moral economy of welfare. Then I outline the precarious living and working conditions in which these hyper-mobile migrants function. I conclude with a discussion of how the Roma migrants interpret and justify the fraud as a claim to social citizenship, a necessity and a critique of the unjust system in which they live. I show how this is based on their ideas of a good and deserving worker and citizen and a vision of what the role of the state is as a caring institution.

Precarious Labour, Ruptured Citizenship, and the Moral Economy of Welfare

The social and political background in which this case evolved is one of growing hostility and differentiation towards the newer EU member states like Romania and Bulgaria, framed under the banner of “poverty migration.” “Poverty migration”/“benefit tourism” has been one of the leading tropes in the moral panic discourse entertained by numerous western European politicians and media over the last decade. ⁴ It describes the “influx” of eastern European migrants who supposedly “abuse” western welfare systems. This rhetoric is particularly strong in the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands, the countries that were the last to lift labour restrictions for Bulgarians and Romanians in January 2014. “Poverty migration” implies a fear of the new EU citizens abusing the Western state both by claiming welfare benefits and by providing cheap labour under informal arrangements. The new EU citizens are depicted as dangerous by virtue of their poverty, which makes them prone to informal and exploitative labour relations, and by virtue of their EU citizenship, which entitles them to free mobility and access to social benefits. ⁵ At its core, the fear of “poverty migration” contradicts the very essence of EU citizenship. It demarcates between desired and undesired categories of EU citizens and migrants, categories based on the type of work performed and morally judged as either good or bad. Moreover, this discourse demonstrates that citizenship rights, like access to welfare or enjoying freedom of movement, are far from universal, being exclusively encouraged both in discourse and in policy and practices only for “good citizens,” who happen to be “good workers.” The case here allows us to deconstruct this moral binary of deserving versus fraudulent migrants and show how the concepts of deservingness, fairness, and justice are reinterpreted in a new moral framework—an inclusive moral economy of welfare.

In recent decades welfare systems have been undergoing transformations in almost all advanced industrial countries, with privatization and retrenchment of public services, marketization of healthcare, and new contractual relations on the insurance principle. All this has reconfigured the relationships and the distribution of responsibilities between states, markets, families, and individuals for the provision of security. ⁶ There has been a growing discrepancy between formal (legal status) and substantive (practices and enactments of rights and obligations) citizenship. Coded as a “disaggregation of citizenship” ⁷ or “mutations of citizenship,” ⁸ this is the process in which citizenship rights (political, social, civil, cultural, etc.)—once bound together as an ensemble and depending on legal status and a territorial bond in a nation-state—are being fragmented and detached from each other. One effect of this disaggregation is the prevention of certain individuals with formal status from enjoying full citizenship rights. In this way, formal citizens can be excluded from access to social rights, for example, and become what Margaret Somers calls the “internally stateless.” ⁹ The case of the Roma migrants illustrates a modality of being internally stateless both in their position as Bulgarian citizens and in their position as internal EU migrants, in which their formal entitlements to welfare benefits cannot be transformed into substantive claims unless, as this case illustrates, they use some form of fraud.

The internally stateless are a product of the marketization and contractualization of citizenship that come with neoliberalism and market-driven governance. Somers describes this as the process in which the relationship between citizens and the state becomes contractual and based on the value of the citizen as a tax-paying productive worker. This distorts the universality of rights, while social inclusion and moral worth become a conditional privilege that needs to be earned. ¹⁰ Along similar lines, Bryan S. Turner developed the concept of Denizenship Type 2, ¹¹ referring to the erosion of social citizenship as citizens begin to resemble denizens or strangers in their own societies, and he describes the attenuated social and economic status of citizens under regimes of austerity and diminished rights and opportunities. EU citizenship in particular favours the understanding of the citizen as a worker and relies on a narrow conception of work as regular paid employment, which excludes a large number of work categories like part-time work, care work, and non-standard forms of employment from full access to citizenship entitlements. ¹²

The extensive literature on the widespread restructuring of welfare into workfare demonstrates that neoliberal reforms do not simply reduce public spending, but they create a state mechanism of differentiation between the “worthy” and the “unworthy.” The creation of “neoliberal social insecurity” has affected particularly badly particular social classes and ethnic/racialized groups, like the poor Roma across eastern Europe. ¹³ The move from a protective welfare regime to punitive workfare created the image of the “undeserving racialized poor.” Workfare, or so-called activation schemes, break the unconditional contract between citizens and the state and make it exclusive and contingent on the ability to provide labour, even when the labour market does not offer real jobs in certain regions or for certain social classes. This move turns certain groups, particularly the Roma, into unworthy citizens who do not deserve the state’s support. ¹⁴

Scholars have researched the uneven modalities and degrees of migrant inclusion within society, calling it “differential inclusion.” ¹⁵ We witness irregular migration and informal work being tolerated, with access to welfare being restricted for migrants in western European countries. This process creates internal hierarchies between deserving and undeserving migrants, and between migrants and citizens. Such internal hierarchies of migrants produce in practice unequal access to welfare and asymmetrical social relations, ¹⁶ and they transform citizenship in Europe from equality on paper towards unofficially tolerated stratification. ¹⁷ Through the case of the Roma migrants I argue that this process has complex roots in being simultaneously excluded initially as citizens in their own home country, and then as migrants and EU citizens in their host country.

Within this context of precarious working and living conditions and limited access to state support, Roma migrants develop an agentic approach, in which they claim from the Dutch state what they think they deserve. They position themselves as good workers and deserving citizens and develop a complex understanding of the responsibilities of the two states between which they spread their lives. The fraud in this context can be interpreted as an act of citizenship ¹⁸ through which they insert themselves back into the system from which they have been excluded. Through this, they both reclaim their social citizenship and re-insert themselves in a moral economy of welfare.

By drawing on the framework of the moral economy of welfare, which is seen as a possible future directions for conceptual development, ¹⁹ I seek to weave together these different conceptual fields, to explain how fraud can be framed as a moral claim and as a form of resistance to an unjust system. By introducing the concept of moral economy, E. P. Thompson ²⁰ highlighted a logic of justice and fairness that guides the poor in assessing what is right and good and informs their acts, including protests. Peasant riots are rooted not only in actual deprivation but also in moral indignation with an unjust system. In James Scott’s ²¹ work, the moral economy of Indonesian peasants corresponds to a system of values, a “subsistence ethics” in which the right to subsistence is a moral right at the heart of economic justice. The sense of justice brings peasants to invoke and claim rights. While fraud can be seen as a form of resistance and a claim to justice, it is not directed against the capitalist economy of exploitation of low-skilled migrants. It is directed against the state failing to support those whose subsistence is at risk. In this sense, moral economy allows us to explain how an unjust system can prevail, even when people question its principles. Principles of citizenship, deservingness, and fairness are invoked, and not workers’ resistance and mobilization, which allows the reproduction of exploitation with the support of the state.

In a moral economy of welfare, the state is expected to care for the disadvantaged on a principle of reciprocity among citizens who have accepted this as morally just. ²² Yet, in this case, migrant workers see themselves as deserving to be included in the host country’s welfare not simply by virtue of European citizenship, but by virtue of their productive power as workers who contribute to the social reproduction of society through their labour. Thus, as Palomera and Vetta argue, moral economy is “well suited to analyse the political culture, norms and expectations of the various groups of people involved in social reproduction.” ²³ When the state is seen as failing to assume its responsibility, fraud is used to correct this within a moral logic of restoring justice. ²⁴ By analysing fraud as a moral act within what is considered an unjust order, I aim, along with the editors and the other authors in this special section, to approach capitalism as a complex moral order where actors question its principles and challenge the dominant notions of deservingness created by it.

The Fraud

Defining the fraud as a fraud in the first place is a work of contested interpretation. The methodological choice to refer to the particular mechanism described here as a “fraud” is based on the term used both by the Roma respondents engaged in these actions and by the authorities and the media. Calling such acts a “fraud”—or rather, a “social benefits fraud” (izmama sus socialni pomoshti)—is a commonly used term and a shortcut for all participants in the discussion. My respondents did not shy away from the term, because the whole situation has been already discussed by the media and because it did involve tricks with inserting their names into the system, by faking documents. They never tried to hide or sugarcoat the actions used and they did not use different terms for that. However, when talking about it, some used a critical discourse, by laughing or by using air quotes or a specific intonation and facial expression. The way the fraud was interpreted and framed is discussed later in the paper. Here, I describe the actual mechanism, as explained to me by the people involved in it.

I arrived in the village of Ivanski just after the deputy mayor of Rotterdam had made an official visit to the region. One of the first people I met was Asen, a young man who was currently in Bulgaria, in between stints of working as a construction worker in Rotterdam. Asen explained the whole fraud scheme without any hesitation. Turkish intermediaries, who usually assisted in finding jobs and accommodation for migrants, also offered the service “address registration,” where they provided a fake rental contract for a monthly fee so that migrants could use this to apply for housing subsidies. The fee was 150 euros and once deducted from the subsidy, Asen received 150 euros in hand. He explained the scheme matter-of-factly, adding that everyone participates in it and it has become part of the “welcome package.” In some cases, the intermediaries helped them to ask for extra benefits retrospectively, which is what attracted the Dutch authorities’ attention eventually. But few went to the Netherlands with the sole purpose of signing up for benefits. The majority were there to work and used the fraud scheme to simply survive in between work gigs and to pay for the meagre housing they could afford.

The mechanism for receiving housing subsidies through fake address registration was well-known in the whole region and was practised by the majority of the migrants. In all interviews I conducted, people spoke freely of this and explained to me how it worked without much deviation from Asen’s story. They did refer to this in different words, like—scheme (shema) or the thing with the social benefits (rabotata s pomoshtite), accompanied by a wink or a grin. But fraud was also quite commonly used in an almost neutral way. It had become a step in the migration trajectory, a mass strategy to supplement one’s income, which was taken into account when calculating how much one makes as a migrant. The fraud was interpreted as just another step in the migration journey, rather than a special trick or a crime.

Asen had been going back and forth between Bulgaria and the Netherlands for three years, always working informally. Usually, he stayed for a few weeks and went back to Bulgaria if a new job did not turn up immediately. He found work as a day labourer hanging out in a café where local Turkish intermediaries came to hire people. He was sharing a flat with another ten or more migrants like him, paying five euros per night for a bed in a shared room. Once the job was done, he would stay for a few days waiting for another one, and if nothing turned up, he would take one of the migrant minibuses going straight to Shumen, where he would take occasional jobs picking up whatever was in season—mushrooms, walnuts, herbs. He was repeating this routine of hyper-mobility between Bulgaria and the Netherlands several times per year. Asen said he would have preferred to settle down in Rotterdam, but the jobs were too precarious and he could not afford it. However, the hyper-mobility and the lack of a formal working contract also meant that he could not afford to properly rent a flat full-time and have an address registration. This, in turn, meant that even though his low income would have allowed him to qualify for a rent subsidy, he could not file for it, because he could not afford to pay full-time rent and have the address registration required. It is in this context of vulnerability and hyper-mobility that mass fraud has become the norm for most migrants like him. In the next section, I outline the main characteristics of the living and working lives of the majority of the Roma migrants.

Working and Living in Hyper-Mobility

The Roma migrants described here are not exceptional in their mobility trajectories, labour strategies, or access to welfare benefits. Despite the differences among Bulgarian Roma communities, many share similar living conditions, labour strategies, mobility patterns, and engagements with the welfare state. The Roma described here live in a rural area, on the margins of the small town of Shumen, in the northeast region of Bulgaria. They are with low or no education and rely on low-skilled jobs. Housing is irregular, in town ghettos or village areas with shacks, no running water, and no proper streets. The levels of unemployment in the region were higher than the average for the country in 2013, with unregistered unemployment and partial and non-standard employment aggravating the situation. Roma have suffered disproportionately from de-industrialization, restructuring, and privatization in the period after 1989, being the first to lose their jobs and housing. This has resulted in long-term unemployment, de-skilling, and de-proletarianization even of those who were previously included in the industrial and agricultural labour force during late socialism. ²⁵ Lack of landownership or proper housing placed the Roma in a more disadvantageous position than the Turkish or Bulgarian population in the region, forcing them to accept highly precarious and informal labour arrangements and to start migrating intensively.

Formal and secure employment was not available for the Roma in the region of Shumen, with everyday racism and discrimination making it even harder to find a job. In 2013–2014 there were three main types of employment: day labourers in agriculture, informal work in small factories, or seasonal crop collection of herbs, fruit or mushrooms paid per piece. All employment was illicit, even in the few small factories, and the conditions were highly precarious—short-term, seasonal, paid per piece or per day, often below the legal minimum wage. This kind of work did not qualify for standard employment and left the Roma workers in the grey zone of neither being employed nor unemployed. The housing conditions contributed to the precarity of their lives, often in unregulated plots of land with no formal property rights, no individual access to electricity or water, and no sewerage system.

Labour migration to the Netherlands, Germany, or Belgium was considered the only solution, and most households had at least one member abroad. Like Asen, most migrants engaged in hyper-mobility, where they spent short periods abroad alternating with periods at home, sometimes travelling up to six times per year between localities. The main reason for this hyper-mobility was the precarious jobs and insecure income that they constantly supplemented with work in “the other place.” This pattern of movement is more widespread than has been documented. Raia Apostolova calls this a “political economy of movement characterized by a contraction between fixity and motion that unfolds in the context of capital accumulation and a fading welfare state.” ²⁶ The choice of destination countries is linked to the reliance on Turkish intermediaries. Speaking Turkish is a major asset for the Roma migrants, who insert themselves in dense networks of local Turkish middlemen and employers, who are usually second-generation migrants from Turkey, already well incorporated. Besides work, the Turkish middlemen also may provide accommodation and assistance with address registration and other information on social benefits. Most people I met did not learn Dutch, having the support network of the Turkish middlemen. But this intermediary level also blocks direct access to Dutch employers, employment agencies, or social workers, which reinforces capsulation and is a fertile ground for dependency and exploitation.

The labour arrangements in the Netherlands are very similar to those in Bulgaria. The available work is in construction (for men), in the service and agri-food industry, and in retail. Arrangements are informal, without any form of contract, and the wage is per day or per piece. Many of the Roma migrants took small temporary jobs between a few days and a couple of weeks at most and were paid below the minimum wage for the sector. Men in construction, for example, earned about forty euros per day which is almost two times less than the minimum wage and three times less than the wage agreed for unskilled workers in construction. ²⁷ They always got their jobs through intermediaries, being hired to usually work on internal renovations of flats and they never met the Dutch employers.

The workers paid per piece or per hour were in a similarly precarious position. Hotel maids, were paid per cleaned room depending on the high or low season, and greenhouses mushroom pickers depending on the daily growth of crops, which might vary and reduce their wage by half in some days. In low periods, they too, could not afford to pay for accommodation and had to travel back to Bulgaria. Mitigating the risk to the worker by paying only when there is work and not having full-time contracts is a well-known strategy of late capitalist employers. When it includes trans-border mobility, however, the repercussions are even graver, presenting limited or no access to welfare support, as we will see in the next section.

The impossibility of having long-term accommodation is tightly linked with the working conditions. Not having a legal working contract and not being certain that there will be long-term secure income forced people to live in so-called immigrant flats, renting per night mouldy beds in overcrowded rooms. Being able to leave and return whenever is the only way they could afford the accommodation—five euros per night when they need it instead of full-time rent, utilities and other taxes. The precarious working conditions defined this basic insecurity in housing and daily life.

Entitled on Paper, but Not in Practice: The Withdrawal of Social Citizenship

Asen did not enjoy moving back and forth so often and not being able to settle in the Netherlands. He had a wife and two kids. The kids stayed in Bulgaria full time with his parents, while the wife sometimes joined him in the Netherlands. They did not apply for children benefits, because they could not enrol the children in school full time. Sending children back or leaving them behind is a common practice among hyper-intensive migrants that affects not only the nuclear family but also the generation of the grandparents, who, often former migrants themselves, have to relocate and become dependent on the young generation. ²⁸ For Asen, not being able to make enough money to stay full time in the Netherlands was unfair. He did not think he could change the labour market, but he did have expectations from the state.

If I had the social benefits (socialni) that people receive here, I could stay longer, even when I am not working, and try to learn some Dutch, get some new contacts. They turn a blind eye on us working like this—cash-in-hand—and being paid so little. They don’t come to check. Of course, they don’t. We are cheaper that way. But then . . . they should also support us, don’t you think? We are poor and unemployed half of the month, when there is no work, but we don’t get any socialni. This is not fair!

They is the state, a collective image of the institutions that Asen expects to make up for the insecurity in which he lives. He formulates a right on the basis of him being a worker, who cannot support himself and his family through his income. As we will see, “the state” and “they” are a mixed generalized category, and depending on the context it could mean Bulgaria, the Netherlands, or the EU.

Indeed, the state, in this case the Dutch state, does not provide support for this category of migrant workers. Tolerating illicit employment and below-minimum wages, and the resulting part-time housing, in practice, excludes Roma migrants from access to the welfare system. While on paper many of them should have qualified due to their low income and non-permanent employment, the fact that they do not have contracts or legal address registration excludes them from access to housing benefits, unemployment, child benefits, and other forms of social support available for citizens and other migrants. Being incorporated in the labour market as a cheap, disposable, and non-contractual labour force not only does not guarantee inclusion in the social system but, in fact, hinders it. The Dutch state does not support the workers because they remain invisible for it and because they are not sedentary enough to enter into the system.

Similarly, the Bulgarian state provides, in principle, welfare benefits for its citizens who cannot make enough income. But, in practice, the system is very restrictive, based on a workfare model, and the benefits are way below the poverty line to provide any form of meaningful financial support. The Bulgarian welfare system, too, is built on the idea of a sedentary individual and is often tied to prior full-time standard employment. To be involved in a workfare programme, one needs to have been registered for at least six months as unemployed and involves fourteen days of part-time work per month. The pay is 47 leva (24 euros), which is seven times less than the established poverty line for 2013. These conditions do not allow people to survive and the workfare does not allow them to actually work informally or be mobile. As a result, the Roma simply did not register and relied on informal work and intensive mobility. “It’s not worth it” was the usual answer to why someone is not registered for the workfare programme. The requirements, paired with the very low monetary reward, made state support a burden rather than real assistance in their eyes.

Sylvia, a young mother of two, and her partner had been going to Rotterdam for five years, leaving their children in Bulgaria. They would have preferred to settle down either there or back in Bulgaria, but they could not afford it. Sylvia never worked in Bulgaria and her work in the Netherlands was informal and short-term, just like the other migrants. She never even applied for social benefits in Bulgaria, not even for the child allowance. They never stayed for more than three months. She would leave the children in Bulgaria sometimes, at other times she would travel with them and her mother-in-law. Her partner worked in construction, repairing bathrooms, and she worked in the back of a shop, loading packages in storage. Neither of them had a contract. They worked for weekly or daily wages. They shared a flat with other villagers and relied on the Turkish middlemen to find work. When we talked about the housing benefits, she said that she has been receiving benefits for two years now. Even though half of the time she actually was not in the Netherlands, in Bulgaria, she received nothing from the state—not even the child benefits that she is entitled to. They live in a tiny, one-room house, with an external toilet, no running water, and a mud path leading to the main road. Her address registration was in a different village, where her aunt used to live.

Why would I even bother to deal with registering and asking for money in Bulgaria. It’s so little that I cannot even buy diapers for the baby. And then they will start asking questions, sending check-ups, we are registered in another village . . . Too much trouble for nothing. What they give here is a joke!

While the public stereotypes, fuelled by right-wing political discourse, build the image of the Roma as “milking” the welfare state by being lazy and living off benefits, the case of Ivanski demonstrates that this is not the case, which has been confirmed by other sociological analyses. ²⁹ Very few of the Roma villagers were registered in any form for social benefits. Moreover, this triggered a defensive approach of the Roma themselves. The Roma felt tricked by the state and by society at large. The state has withdrawn and does not assume responsibility for its citizens in need.

My respondents formulated this in similar ways using expressions like “The state abandoned us, the Roma,” a woman in her 50s said. “No work, no socialni [social benefits], how to survive living here . . .” Another one from the same village commented on the withdrawal of the state in infrastructural matters, especially towards the Roma.

They keep us at the edge of the village, with no streets, no water pipes, no sewerage. But when elections come, they come with the big words and want us to believe them. They use us and give nothing back.

The sense of being used for political votes without reciprocity is a common trope. A younger migrant further commented:

They want us to vote, but when it comes to making something about work in the region, silence. And when there is no work, you want to rely on some support, some cash. You go to register for the social benefits, and you find out you will get 47 leva per month and you need to work for this money on top of that. This is a joke, they are making fun of us. No one can live on this money. So we go abroad and make ends meet the way we know.

The critique of existing benefits on paper that do not represent actual financial support, compared to what is needed, kept coming up in all the conversations. It was always accompanied by an expressed disappointment and a sense of abandonment.

At the same time, the social benefits in the Netherlands were considered fair and appropriate to support someone without a full income. Migrants commented that the money that the Dutch state would give to people in their situation was fair and sufficient. Yet they could not qualify due to their short-term stays and the expenses for housing they could not afford. While the Bulgarian state abandoned them through having a restrictive workfare regime and meagre financial benefits, the Dutch state did not allow them entry into the social benefits schemes that they felt they were entitled to.

A group of young men who worked in street repairing in Groningen, for a Turkish subcontractor, explained that they have to work for certain periods and then they have to wait for the next task. In the meantime, they are not paid, and therefore, they cannot afford full-time rent—a situation common for almost everyone migrating from this region. Thus, while they did not make enough money per month and would qualify for additional welfare support, they could not apply for it unless they engaged in the fraud scheme with fake address registrations. The young men used expressions like “unfair system,” “using us for work, but not supporting us for life,” “the Dutch state wants us to repair its streets, but not to pay us the benefits,” and “they trick us, not we them, by not having a way to pay us the benefits in the way we live.” These excerpts were common tropes also coming up in other interviews. The sense of unfairness and partial incorporation for labour, but not for life, as one of them formulated it, contextualizes the act of fraud in a context of feeling unjustly treated not by one, but by two states.

The Bulgarian state would give them welfare through the workfare program if they would register, not having any other income, and be sedentary, but they would not be able to live off this income. The Dutch state could provide them with welfare benefits if they would stay in one place and have full-time accommodation and address registration, which they cannot afford. Thus, both states exclude them in practice. Differential inclusion in the Netherlands and internal statelessness in Bulgaria frame those working Roma as excluded both as migrants and as citizens. It is in this context that the benefit fraud takes place.

Conflicting Tropes of Fraud: A Crime, a Survival Strategy, a Necessity, a Trick

Uncovering the fraud scheme triggered a variety of reactions coming from different actors, which embodied a spectrum of interpretations of who deserves to receive support and who is supposed to provide this support. Conflicting moral orders were mobilized to position the Roma as victims or villains. For the Dutch authorities, the fraud was a crime against the Dutch state committed by immigrants who abused their EU citizenship status. ³⁰ The deputy mayor of Rotterdam came personally on a visit to Shumen to discuss ways in which Bulgaria should control better its citizens, stressing that the “problems have to be solved where they emerge” and that the “migration is not the solution.” He added that Rotterdam does not have the social infrastructure to welcome the Roma with their ways of life. ³¹ It remained unclear how he imagined the Bulgarian authorities limiting migration in the context of free EU mobility. The Dutch media mobilized the usual set of stereotypes against the poor eastern European migrants overflowing their country as benefit tourists but also blamed the Dutch state for being ineffective, with too many loopholes and being too easy to trick by foreigners. ³²

The tabloid Bulgarian media largely reproduced the divisions of good and bad migrants but applied as usual a racializing twist, dividing migrants into good, hardworking Bulgarians versus bad, abusing, and benefit-relying Roma, blaming the Roma for the negative reputation of all Bulgarians. ³³ The fraud case was presented not so much as an offence against the Dutch state, but a transgression against fellow citizens who were thus stained with negative fame. The local Bulgarian authorities steered away from these interpretations and provided an interpretation of fraud as a survival strategy. “It is a matter of survival for the poorest, with least resources, who can’t even afford to go and work abroad properly,” the village mayor said in an interview. “The state has deserted the region,” he added, explaining what drives the villagers to look for work and income elsewhere. In his defence of the fraudsters, he clearly formulated a critique of uneven development and lack of state responsibility for the region.

The different interpretations mobilized different moral orders where the Roma migrants occupied a spectrum of positions—from criminals abusing the system, through bad citizens and bad migrants (as opposed to the other, good migrants), to victims of a careless state and a cruel economy. In the big clamour of conflicting public reaction, one voice remained unheard: the voice of the main actors—the participants in the fraud schemes. They were spoken for but never heard directly. In the next section, I trace the complicated logic that those participating in the fraud scheme developed to justify their actions and frame them in moral terms.

Benefit Fraud as Reclaiming Social Citizenship

When I started talking to people about the fraud case that became public in the news, what struck me straightaway was the ease with which almost everyone was talking like Asen above; people engaged casually in the details of how they have been “tricking the system” without any sign of embarrassment or secrecy. It soon became clear that while the infamous fraud case was an exception in its scale, most people who migrated on a regular basis were involved in some form of tricking the welfare system of the destination state. “Tricking the system” was seen not as a transgression, but as a form of making it even to a system that is unfair.

Perhaps the most condensed formulation on these issues came from Krassi, another young man in his twenties, who has been migrating back and forth between Bulgaria and the Netherlands over the last five years, working small and seasonal jobs in both places for short periods. When I asked him how come he speaks with no inhibition of the different tricks he performs to get extra benefits, he said:

Why should I be ashamed of this? It’s not like we are stealing from someone, say from you, or from a house, it’s state money ( durzhavni pari ). Our state here gives us nothing, has us for nothing (nyama ni za nishto), no matter how much we need support. It doesn’t give us jobs, doesn’t give us social benefits. How are we to live like this? And for Holland this money is nothing, like a flea bit it. They give this money to everyone who needs it. So what if we have to trick it a bit, to get it. We still deserve it. We are there, working, and we are in need. . . . like all the other citizens there, the state has to support us, if we can’t make ends meet only with work, right?

Krassi’s words demonstrate the complexity of how most migrants justified the fraud. While they were perfectly aware that this is not the legal way of receiving the housing subsidies, they did not consider it a full-fledged crime. For them the fraud has a practical side—supplementing their meagre income as a survival strategy. In this sense, it was thought of as a necessity. “You have to get this money otherwise you can’t make it in the Netherlands,” Krassi further explained. Having access to these subsidies allowed them to stay for longer periods when jobs were not immediately available and to cover for the gaps in payment, as I have illustrated above. Not being able to request the subsidy officially due to their living and working circumstances, they resorted to fraud as the only possible way.

The knowledge and skills to get by and make a living through various sources is a skill described by Jan Grill in relation to Slovak Roma migrants in the United Kingdom. ³⁴ Just as in the case described by him, here it is not simply about income-generating strategies, but also, more generally, about variously distributed degrees of social intelligence and the disposition to manoeuvre within asymmetric fields of power and interstitial spaces between different state systems.

At the same time, there is also a moral justification for committing the fraud and not considering it a “real crime.” First, it is not stealing, because they take money from the state, not from a person, Krassi says. There is a fine line of what constitutes a crime. “It’s not like taking money from someone, or taking things from somebody’s house or from a shop. This is the state money that is supposed to get to people like us, to help us,” I was told by another migrant. Second, they feel that the Dutch state is rich, especially in comparison with the Bulgarian state, and their “trick” does not really affect it. This is what is contained in the popular expression “a flea bit it,” used by everyone to show that something is so insignificant that one does not even notice it. There is an inherent logic of redistribution here, where the rich state can be cheated of small amounts without even noticing. But these small amounts would make all the difference for those performing the trick.

In Krassi’s words, we also see the comparison with the Bulgarian state, which does not take care of its own citizens. It does not provide the conditions for them being able to work and it does not provide welfare support for them to survive. The disappointment in the current Bulgarian state comes as a comparison, both with the Dutch state and with the socialist Bulgarian state. My respondents mobilized a somewhat idealized reconstruction of late socialism, when the Roma in the region had guaranteed employment in the industry and in the agricultural cooperatives, which also provided them with proper housing. These nostalgic memories were also an important form of critique of their current situation and the role of the state as compared to the socialist state. This view is illustrated in the words of Ghina, who criticizes the Bulgarian state by evoking the past:

Bay Tosho [Todor Zhivkov] gave us work. If you didn’t go to work, the militia came to your house to take you to the factory. We got salaries every month. We could pay the bills, get food on the table, have a home. The state took care of us. And now . . . look at them [the politicians], they only wonder how to chase us away from everywhere. They don’t give us work, nor do they help us in any way. We can’t use the socialni [social benefits], and anyways they are so small that you can’t live on them. So what are we left with? (Ghina, a middle-aged woman)

The complex juxtaposition between the caring state of the past, the current failing Bulgarian state, and the host state, which could make up for the failings of the home state, is not uncommon among migrants in other contexts. The good and the bad states are qualified through the lens of caring or deserting/abandoning, as also mentioned earlier here. ³⁵ In similar contexts, for example Slovakia, Nicolette Makovicky explains the widely shared belief of people that the state has “abandoned its moral obligation to provide for its citizens,” ³⁶ as a reaction to neoliberal reforms of lowering corporate tax, while cutting welfare support in the context of growing unemployment and inflation. The migrants feel abandoned and chased away by their own uncaring state, despite their status as citizens who deserve to be supported if not by economic opportunities, at least through welfare. However, the welfare is so little that they do not even see a reason to apply for it, as I have already described earlier. This sense of abandonment and the idea of the uncaring state is the background against which the fraud is interpreted in moral terms.

Finally, there is the claim to the social citizenship side. A complex connection between labour, citizenship, and deservingness is established in the narratives and in the acts of the migrants. Krassi speaks of deserving support by the Dutch state based on his position as a worker in the Netherlands who cannot make a living just by working. For him, deservingness is tied to labour, regular or illicit. And if workers cannot support themselves, even though they are working, then the state should be responsible and support them. And in principle it is—by providing various forms of poverty relief—but not in the case of the hyper-mobile migrants from Bulgaria. The migrants knew that and for that reason felt that they were taking only what they were already entitled to. Thus the fraud is not interpreted as a negative act and a crime, but as an act of restoring justice and reclaiming their social citizenship rights. Kircho, a migrant who worked in retail as a loader of trucks, formulated it like this:

We work, we help them, we build their houses and flats, their roads, we work in their shops. We work for them, but we can hardly make ends meet. We work so much—10 hours a day and more—but we don’t make proper money. We can’t afford to rent a proper flat. Is this fair? Tell me! . . . So, even if we tried, we could not get this state money that others in our situation can get. But we are not criminals, we work, we don’t steal. So why not be supported like the others? We deserve this money. This is not stealing, right?

This discourse of the deserving worker-citizen mirrors public discourse and policies. The Roma migrants use the same logic of considering themselves deserving, based on their labour as migrants. Even when they talk of abandonment by the Bulgarian state, it is paired with the accusation that the state does not guarantee jobs. They do function within the neoliberal ideology of deservingness based on productive labour, as described both in the workfare literature and in Margaret Sommers’ analysis of citizenship disaggregation. However, while within this ideological framework, the Roma still remain excluded, even when they are incorporated into the labour market in the Netherlands. Their case demonstrates the ever more restrictive mode of state benefit support that requires citizen-workers to fit into a very particular model. In this way, the Roma remain excluded from what they know they should be entitled to.

Their labour is not recognized, and it is not protected in any way. They are not protected as citizens—local or EU citizens—because they are invisible to the social security system and the labour legislation. The informal, ultra-precarious work and the intensive mobility patterns linked to the precarious work make their citizenship rights void. While in principle they should qualify for this support, in practice, they cannot. As a result, the most precarious workers are the ones who are excluded from state support, while at the same time contributing to Dutch society.

A commonly repeated expression was: “we work for them, but they don’t support us,” followed by “so we have to take what we deserve in the ‘other way’ [po drugiya nachin].” “They” is the Dutch state in this case. And the “other way” means fraud. In this sense, the forgery is not conceived as fraud anymore; it is framed as restoring justice. The subsidy is deserved; hence it is not a crime to receive it, irrelevant of the mechanism. In this formulation of the migrants, there is a complex claim to citizenship rights that have been taken away from them.

Citizenship and citizenship rights are not always evoked directly, but they are commonly referred to when talking of being entitled to benefits. The responsibility of the state to take care of its citizens, feeling abandoned by the state, and having rights like all other citizens were topics that often came up, as already shown before. The fraud is then interpreted by the Roma migrants as an innocent administrative trick, rather than a crime, but also as taking something they are entitled to. “We have the right to these benefits, why not take them somehow, if needed, through faking the address registration,” said a construction worker. Having the right, being entitled, came up in many of the interviews as a justification for participating in the scheme. It is based on this that I see the fraud as an act of citizenship and as a moral claim to restoring justice.

Conclusion

Drawing on the acts and interpretations of the mobile workers, I have showed that the social benefits fraud is framed as a moral claim to social citizenship. It is a claim that is made from the perspective of those who deem themselves “good workers” and who see themselves as deserving social support but are excluded from it due to bureaucratic restrictions on mobile population. Committing fraud is understood as restoring the moral order, re-establishing justice, and re-claiming social citizenship. This move is based on moral understandings of what is just and fair and who is a deserving worker and citizen. In this sense, it is framed in a moral economy of welfare that stands to correct the purely economic logic of the market through a well-functioning welfare state.

To explain this, I have demonstrated how the structural conditions of poverty, racialization, precarious labour, and migrant patterns produce the paradoxes of the mobile working poor. As cheap, exploitable eastern European labour, they are trapped in the position of not being able to make a living just by selling their labour. At the same time, intensive mobility patterns combined with informal and uncertain work place migrant workers in a position outside welfare systems to which they should be entitled to in principle. To correct the failings of the state to care for them as citizens and workers, they resort to fraud. In a moral economy of welfare, their act is interpreted as restoring justice and reclaiming their social citizenship, and not as a crime or transgression. What is more, fraud is an act of moral critique against an unjust economic and social order that keeps them on the margins as transgressors. By means of fraud, migrants act against the exclusion and precarity in which they are trapped by the market and structural conditions as a whole. By inserting themselves back into state support, they are restoring the moral economy of welfare.

Employing a moral economy lens answers the call of the editors of this special section to explore when, how, and why actors buy into or contest dominant ideas about distribution and hierarchy, as well as notions of the “good society” and the “good state,” thus contributing to analysis of the “the political character and underpinnings of moral orders in capitalism; that is the politics of the promotion of particular notions of the acceptable, good, and desirable, rather than others.”