The neoliberal welfare state and its discontents. Slow violence against irregular migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Welfare rights in Norway, as in other European nation-states, are increasingly used as techniques of control and management of irregular migration. Proliferation of borders is generated by dispersal of welfare rights, establishing structural differentiations. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, we argue that the neoliberal welfare state produces precarious subject positions in three mundane ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including what we call digital borders. Exploring the bordering structures of the welfare state we analyse the complex relation between technologies of government and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we understand this relation as slow violence. This slow violence operates and is legitimized through the legal, policy and neoliberal welfare structures of the state. We show that the welfare state’s implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state’s principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Simultaneously, the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state dwindle egalitarianism as a principle and value.

KEYWORDS:

• Slow violence
• temporality
• digital borders
• irregular migrants
• precarity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notably, there are different definitions of welfare chauvinism, see i.e. Jørgensen and Thomsen (2016) for a discussion.

2 Available at Skriftlig spørsmål – stortinget.no, accessed 04.03.21.

3 Sak nr. 2 [12:38:22] – stortinget.no, accessed 04.03.21

4 The DUF number is a registration number in the computer system of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI). In Norway, everyone applying for asylum or for a residence permit will be assigned a DUF number.