Welfare state bordering as a form of mobility and migration control

ABSTRACT

This article introduces this special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. In it, we present and discuss the concept of welfare state bordering. The notion of welfare state bordering that we develop refers to state-authorised practices of managing access to social rights based on residence, migrancy, and/or citizenship in a given socio-political order. These practices are in most cases implemented by national and local governments and institutions, but welfare state bordering can be implemented by various actors to whom the state has granted the power to manage access to rights, services and residence. We situate the notion of welfare state bordering in the scholarship on borders and bordering practices. We offer an overview of the four welfare state contexts discussed in this issue: the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Norway. We examine the ways in which various forms of welfare state bordering practices in these countries generate different configurations of exclusion and inclusion for both noncitizens and marginalised citizens on various inter-related levels of governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Welfare state
• bordering
• mobility
• migration control
• precarity
• individualization
• workfare

Introduction

The use of welfare policies as a means to control migration has become a topic of considerable research, increasing in the aftermath of the long summer of migration of 2015, especially in Europe (see e.g. Karlsen 2021; Lafleur and Mescoli 2018; Lafleur and Vintila 2023).¹ A growing number of migrants live and work in temporary, precarious and conditional legal positions, with the threat of deportation shaping their everyday lives. Depending on their legal status and/or employment, they have differentiated access to welfare services. European Union (EU), European Economic Area (EEA) and third-country nationals alike struggle to access welfare benefits in their European countries of residence (Simola 2018) due to limited knowledge of the welfare system, language, lack of documentation and/or discrimination (Vintila and Lafleur 2023). While EU/EEA citizens enjoy the right to move freely within the EU/EEA territories, this freedom is closely connected to remunerated activity, such as working or job seeking, and reliance on social security can constitute a basis for expulsion. Thus, the rights for mobility, work and welfare are closely connected in Europe.

Indeed, a large international body of literature on noncitizenship, ‘alienage’ and denizenship has investigated how borders and immigration controls produce various kinds of conditional migrant subjects and their differential inclusion in the sphere of rights (e.g. Balibar 2004, 2016; Bosniak 2006; Goldring and Landolt 2013; Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Papadopoulos and Tsianos 2013). This literature has demonstrated that the overlap between citizenship, the nation-state and the welfare state has changed dramatically over the past decades.

Simultaneously, scholarship also argues for the need to disentangle the naturalised clear-cut distinction between citizens and migrants (e.g. Anderson 2019, 2024). Some neoliberal changes of the welfare state, such as the introduction of workfare policies, i.e. policies that require people to work in return for social benefits, affect citizens as well as noncitizens. Yet, workfare polices, as other welfare state measures, do not affect all populations in similar ways, and this racialised unevenness is part of its bordering function, we argue. Sainsbury (2012, 5) showed that migrant entry categories, integration and welfare regimes all shape migrants’ access to social rights. Moreover, welfare policies can be explicitly implemented to limit (ir)regular migration through enforced limitations on who can access publicly funded services (Van der Leun and Bouter 2015). Such policy measures have been conceptualised as symbolic politics of deterrence (Lemberg-Pedersen 2016) through which states seek to discourage (ir)regular migrants and asylum seekers from arriving. The assumption is that generous welfare states attract people seeking asylum (Lindberg 2020). These assumptions can be considered as part of ‘welfare chauvinism’ or ‘welfare nationalism’, which promotes the idea of the welfare state limited only to members of the national community (Barker 2017; Jørgensen and Thomsen 2016; Keskinen, Norocel, and Jørgensen 2016).

Scholars have demonstrated the contradictory demands that individual gatekeepers in providing services face when managing their work in their encounters with (ir)regular migrants (Karl-Trummer, Novak-Zezula, and Metzler 2009; Karlsen 2021; Misje 2020; Price and Spencer 2015; Schweitzer 2019; Van der Leun 2006). Welfare policies and their interpretation are the responsibility of various substate tiers, which have various levels of autonomy in the interpretation and administration of national policies (Spencer and Delvino 2019). Scholarship indicates that local governments, especially at the city level, often offer different access to welfare services than nation-state governments (Fauser 2019; Spencer and Delvino 2019). The reasons why cities and municipalities decide to do so range from economic, social policy and human rights motivations to crime prevention, public health concerns, child protection, managing homelessness and maintaining an inclusive image attractive to tourism (Caponio 2014). Researchers have also emphasised migrants’ efforts to navigate the public social welfare system (e.g. Bendixsen 2018; Mingot and Mazzucato 2019; Safarov 2023). This existing research underscores the fact that social policies have become an instrument of migration control and that there are variations on the ground as to how this form of bordering plays out.

Against this research background, this special issue contributes to scholarly debates on the intersections between welfare state services, migration management and (ir)regular migrants’ mobilisation of resources for their rights in four comprehensive European welfare states: the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Norway. The extensive research literature on borderlands, border regimes and bordering, which we summarise below, has mainly analysed the changing role of borders in relation to sovereign states’ two dimensions: the defence of the border from outside intrusion and the use of bordering in internal safety and security (Aas 2013; see also Wilson and Donnan 2012).

This issue analyses border management in relation to the third function of sovereign states, namely, the welfare of its residents. It also addresses two essential questions: How do different kinds of welfare state bordering practices generate different configurations of exclusion and inclusion at various levels of governance (municipal/city/regional/nation-state levels)? What possibilities do irregular migrants have in mobilising their rights to resist forms of exclusion in the welfare state? The majority of the existing literature on (non)citizenship has emerged in the liberal welfare state regimes of the US and the UK. Thus, there remains a gap in our understanding of (non)citizenship regimes in other welfare state contexts. Recently, scholars have suggested that the welfare state generates social exclusion in Nordic countries (Barker 2017; Könönen 2018a; Näre, Bendixsen, and Maury 2022). Migratory mobilities pose new questions about the inclusionary and exclusionary mechanisms of the welfare state. We need to re-examine the production of membership at specific points in time and in certain locations and ask what the consequences are of differentiated membership for individuals marginalised by the welfare state.

The articles in this issue reveal the different mobility and migration controls configured by welfare state actors, policies and services. The articles demonstrate how the different welfare state apparatuses operate as part of the proliferation of border controls and how they generate spaces of bordering and forms of migration control. First, the issue contributes to empirical discussions on the relationship between social policies and migration at different scales. While the role of welfare state actors as part of mobility control regimes has been alluded to previously (e.g. Anderson 2013; Bendixsen 2018), the specificity of the differential inclusions and bordering effects produced by multi-level welfare state governance has been less discussed. Second, the issue introduces and expands on the concept of ‘welfare state bordering’, with which we mean the ways European nation-states try to manage and control migration via welfare state policies, services and practices. Third, the collection of articles addresses migrants’ autonomous practices through which they mobilise resources to overcome welfare state borders. We aspire to understand the ways in which particular welfare state border management activates certain tactics, strategies and practices, and ways of being-in-the-world as an (ir)regular migrant. This will cast a light on how various European welfare state borders operate differently and its consequences.

In what follows, we first discuss how the notion of welfare state bordering builds on the existing research on borders. We then examine the historical continuities in the control of mobility and labour in three different welfare regimes and in the four countries represented in this issue. This special issue presents case studies from two Nordic welfare states (Finland and Norway), from one continental (Germany) and one liberal welfare state regime (UK), thus representing two EU countries (Germany and Finland) and two non-EU member countries (UK and Norway). We then discuss the individualisation of rights and the move from welfare to workfare, as part of neoliberal tendencies, as well as how increased digitalisation of the welfare state also limits and, in some cases, impedes practical access to social rights for precarious migrants (see also Safarov 2023). We conclude this introduction by summarising the four research articles that constitute this special issue.

From borders to bordering: the concept of welfare state bordering

The categories of the migrant and the citizen and their multiple variations would not exist without borders. Borders demarcate the boundaries of membership in a political community. Membership, according to political theorist Michael Walzer (1983, 29, 31–32), is the primary social good, a good that must be distributed for other social goods, such as welfare, to be enjoyed. The question of membership, who is included and excluded and on what grounds and to what extent, is a central issue of distributive justice that varies across time and place. Similarly, migrant and refugee mobilities, as well as the administrative categories and rights associated with the mobilities and right to residence, are social phenomena embedded in space and time. They emerge as the outcome of nation-state border controls (Kearney 1991) that can be geographical and territorial, but also internal and diffused (Balibar 2004). As De Genova (2013) has argued, without borders, there would just be mobility.

For the past 30 years, research on borderlands and border regimes has demonstrated that attempts to control migration not only take place on the ‘frontiers’, but also inside the territory of any given nation-state (e.g. Alvares 1995; Anzaldúa 1987; Balibar 2002, 2004, 2010; De Genova 2002; Donnan and Wilson 1994, 1999, 2010; Fassin 2011; Guild 2003; Kearney 1991; Khosravi 2010; Lahav 1998). As Balibar (2004, 109, emphasis in the original) has famously argued: ‘borders and the institutional practices corresponding to them have been transported into the middle of political space’. Scholars have emphasised the heterogenous and polysemic character of borders (Balibar 2002, 79–85) and their complex productivity (Balibar 2004; Mezzadra and Neilson 2012).

While it may be analytically possible to distinguish between different scales of geographically and historically contingent ‘borderness’, in practice, borders are already global (Balibar 2010). Borderness refers to ‘different senses of border [that relate] to the way borders are both generated by, and/or help to generate, the classification system that distinguishes (or fails to distinguish) people, places and things in one way rather than another’ (Green 2012, 580). The globality and multi-scalarity of borders is evident in the global colonial and racialised hierarchy of nation-states, according to which being born in the Global South legally handicaps the citizens of these countries (Dauvergne 2008, 17). In the instances of visa applications from a country that is blacklisted, individuals are penalised for the ‘deviance’ of the state (Aas 2013, 30–31). The documents (IDs, passports, visas etc.) produced by those countries are often not trusted by Northern states through the assumption that ‘[u]ntrustworthy states produce untrustworthy identities’ (Aas 2013, 30).

Empirical research by political scientists, such as Lahav (1998), Guiraudon and Lahav (2000) and Guild (2003), has demonstrated that migration and mobility controls are no longer consistent, in practice and legally, with the physical borders of the state, but they are regulated and outsourced to international, transnational and local public actors as well as to private actors, such as cargo companies, employers and civic actors such as churches, NGOs and families. Lahav (1998) made the important point that, historically, there is nothing new in the diffusion of migration control to private actors. For instance, since the 1944 Convention on International Civil Aviation, transport companies have acted as migration controllers by having to check passengers’ travel documents.

The realisation that borders are historical and arbitrary constructions based on cultural convention (Donnan and Wilson 1999, 40) paved the way to analyses of the border itself, leading to studies on the processes and techniques that sustain and make borders (Green 2012). The processual turn from the study of borders to the analysis of bordering as a social process and as a practice began in the 1990s in border studies (see e.g. Newman 2006; Paasi 1998; Rumford 2006; Van Houtum and van Naerssen 1998; Van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofer 2005). Since that time, the interdisciplinary field of border studies has moved towards a more sociological and anthropological understanding of borders as the outcome of complex practices focusing on bordering and de- and re-bordering processes as ‘borderwork’ (Rumford 2008; Vaughan-Williams 2008). Borderwork refers to the work that citizens and noncitizens do ‘in envisioning, constructing, maintaining and erasing borders’ (Rumford 2008, 2). Such bordering practices are temporally unfixed, contested and often connected to violence (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2009, 2012; Vaughan-Williams 2008). More recently, Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy (2019, 5) defined bordering as:

… a principal organising mechanism in constructing, maintaining, and controlling social and political order. This mechanism includes determining not only who is and who is not entitled to enter the country, but also whether those who do would be allowed to stay, work, and require, civil, political, and social rights.

Moreover, they have emphasised the mundaneness of bordering practices by coining the term ‘everyday bordering’ that broadens the concept of bordering to include daily practices through which borders are constructed via ‘ideology, cultural mediation, discourses, political institutions, attitudes and everyday forms of transnationalism’ (Yuval-Davis, Wemyss, and Cassidy 2018, 229). Other scholars have argued that processes of differential inclusion of noncitizens are implemented by actors always authorised by a sovereign power conceptualising such processes as bureaucratic bordering (Näre 2020a), administrative bordering (Könönen 2018b) and institutional bordering (Dimitriadi and Sarantaki 2019).

We introduce the term ‘welfare state bordering’ to describe the extent to which the state makes use of welfare policies and practices to control access to rights and its borders. We define welfare state bordering as practices of controlling and managing access to social rights based on residence, migrancy and/or citizenship in a given socio-political order. Welfare state bordering is perpetuated and enforced by various entities, including national and local governments and institutions, through policy ideology and implemented regulations and by so-called street-level bureaucrats (Lipsky 1980) and other ‘local gatekeepers’ (Iacovetta 2006) who have the power to manage access to rights, services, and residence. Local gatekeepers can be various private and third-sector actors to whom the state has outsourced its functions or, for instance, financial institutions, such as banks, that use discretionary power to limit individuals’ access to bank accounts, potentially preventing access to other social rights. As the articles in this issue show, administrative control of mobility and migration have come to include various actors in the state machinery, including welfare employees, local authority workers, the voluntary sector, private enterprises and individual citizens.

Control of mobility and labour central to modern welfare states

In this section, we offer an overview of the developments of the four welfare states discussed in this issue (the UK, Germany, Finland and Norway). These countries represent three different welfare state models (Esping-Andersen 1990): the liberal welfare state model (UK), the conservative continental European model (Germany) and the Nordic social democratic model (Norway and Finland).

The liberal welfare regime is characterised by limited state redistribution when it comes to family policies, education and old-age care services in favour of private, market solutions in mitigating risks against unemployment and means-tested social services as a last resort to those who are considered deserving (Guentner et al. 2016; Manow 2021, 789–790). Yet the liberal regime has some universal elements, exemplified by the universal health care of the British National Health Service.

The continental welfare state model is contribution-based, i.e. financed primarily through social security contributions instead of taxes, which ties social benefits to employment rather than citizenship and leads to a fragmentation of benefits depending on occupation (Manow 2021, 791). The continental model is more transfer- than service-based, with some exceptions, such as childcare services in Germany (Lewis et al. 2008). Moreover, similar to the liberal welfare states, in continental welfare states, various non-profit associations and organisations have had, and continue to have, a more prominent role in welfare provision than in the Nordic countries (Bahle 2003).

Finally, the Nordic welfare state model is universal in that welfare benefits and services are residence-based combined with earnings-related social insurance programmes (Anttonen and Sipilä 2012). The Nordic countries are labour societies, which means that a large proportion of the population is in formal wage employment. While protection against risks such as illness, poverty and old age are mostly needs-tested, the universalism of the welfare state has eroded since the end of the 1980s. This is especially true when it comes to unemployment benefits and integration support (Kildal and Kuhnle 2005).

While these models are useful heuristic devices that illuminate key divergences and convergences of the studied welfare state contexts, they are ideal types that can easily produce a static and nationalist image of a welfare state, overlooking transnational and colonial processes that are constitutive of all ‘national’ welfare states (Anderson 2019; Bhambra and Holmwood 2018). Models can contribute to an ahistorical understanding of welfare states on the one hand and emphasise the novelty of welfare state bordering on the other. However, there is nothing new about the coupling of labour, welfare and citizenship rights and the control of mobility.

Indeed, prior to the modern nation-states, poor laws in various European countries included restrictions on mobility and requirements for work in exchange for ‘welfare’. The origins of the modern welfare states are in vagrancy and poor laws that distinguish between the deserving and the undeserving poor, based on categories of gender, age and ability but also on residence and settlement (Green 2010). Thus, the modern welfare state has its roots in the control of mobility, labour and categorising deservingness. In Britain, the vagrant, Anderson (2013, 13) has argued, was perceived as a threat to social cohesion and is therefore one of the ancestors of both the migrant and the failed citizen. Historically, in Britain, the White working class was categorised as the deserving poor, while non-White colonial labourers were considered susceptible to dependency and thus undeserving of social welfare in the British empire (Mayblin 2020, 34). The development of the modern British welfare state from the Beveridge report of 1942 onwards was from the outset entangled with xenophobic fears of foreigners taking advantage of social benefits (Fraser 2017, 3).

Similarly, in continental Europe, several categories were established in relation to people’s mobility and perceived threat: for instance, the honourable citizens, the Hausarme (house poor) and the honourable outsiders (such as travellers and journeymen) were distinguished from various groups of dishonourable outsiders categorised as itinerants and vagrants. The dishonourable groups were perceived as an economic burden but also a potential threat to the health and well-being of other groups, which is why various forms of border control and deportation emerged in the early modern period in the states of the Holy Roman Empire (Stolleis 2013).

The Nordic welfare state similarly has the control of mobility and labour at its roots. In Sweden and Finland, care for the paupers was institutionalised in the eighteenth century through two systems based on the ability to work. The able-bodied paupers were made to move from one estate to the next and work in return for their sustenance, while the parishes paid compensation to estates for the care of those poor and old people who were not able to work. Vagrancy laws were established to prevent the latter group from leaving the estates to which they were allocated (Mikkola 1987).

Welfare based on work: deservingness and individualisation of rights

While the control of mobility and labour has always been an important element in the organisation of welfare, contemporary forms of welfare state bordering are more complex than before. Today, border regimes include multi-level governance structures that combine various local (city, municipal, regional), national and supranational levels on which borders, mobility and rights to welfare are governed. Simultaneously, during the last three decades, neoliberal ideologies have impacted the welfare states in focus here through the introduction of market principles (competition and economic incentives), contracting out public tasks, privatising state functions and fragmenting governance (Horn, Kevins, and van Kersbergen 2023). The neoliberalisation of the welfare state means that social benefits are no longer considered as rights given by citizenship, but rather dependent on fulfilling obligations (Handler 2003).

A common trend in the welfare policies in many European countries since the 1990s has been a move towards labour activation strategies in various forms, such as workfare. The concept of ‘workfare’ (Peck 2001) refers to a policy strategy guided by the enforcement of work while residualising welfare benefits. It is based on the idea that poverty is a consequence of individual behaviour rather than an inequality produced by socioeconomic structures. First applied in the US in the late 1970s and a decade later in various European countries, activation policies represent a recommodification of labour power because of their practice of reducing social benefits and forcing people to work (Rueda 2015). A step towards a more neoliberal social policy, the explicit political objectives of activation are to make the individual dependent on the markets rather than the state.

In Nordic welfare legislation, the predominance of work has always been central (Kildal 2001). Yet, workfare meant a shift from the regulative principle that everybody should have the right to fulfil their duty to work to the belief that everybody has the duty to fulfil their right to work. While workfare strategies in the Nordic countries can be considered to be of a more universalistic type, workfare policies in the UK are more liberal, emphasising moral obligations. The UK is considered atypical in the European context due to its focus on punitive measures. In the late 1980s, Thatcher’s conservative administration initiated extensive workfare measures for the unemployed (Finn and Schulte 2008). Although compulsion, characteristic of the US workfare regime, was long resisted in Britain, it was adapted from the late 1990s onwards (Peck and Theodore 2001). The Welfare Reform Act 2012 transformed the welfare system in the UK by increasing conditionality and promoting paid work as the best form of welfare. The Act also introduced tougher sanctions for those who do not meet the conditions of their benefit entitlements (Patrick 2014, 706).

Germany followed the post-2015 tendency of Western welfare states to use restrictive social policies directed towards migrants and their eligibility for welfare benefits (Lafleur and Mescoli 2018). Germany’s ‘workfare approach’ to integration includes the practice of reserving integration for the ‘deserving ones’ (Hinger 2020). In the early 2000s, Germany introduced the Hartz IV reforms in which economically deprived people would supposedly be incentivised to work through the motto ‘Fördern und Fordern’ (Promoting and Demanding). The Integration Act of 2016 extended this motto to also rejected asylum-seekers and refugees with ‘good prospects to stay’ with the intention of activating these people for the labour market (Fontanari 2022).

In short, activation policies have different designs. In the Nordic welfare states, active labour market programmes and ‘flexicurity’ are more emphasised than conditionality, which is found in more liberal regimes (Thelen 2014). Common to all is the coupling of work and migration status.

Depending on the type, welfare models create different perceptions of the deservingness of welfare recipients. As workfare policies are implemented locally, perceptions of deservingness shape actual access to social welfare and unemployment benefits (Kroll and Blomberg 2011). Workfare regimes come with the risk of stigmatising those who rely on welfare, creating social hierarchies due to perceived cultural differences (Fallov 2011) and perpetuating the idea of a ‘culture of dependency’ (where the so-called malformed work ethic of the poor is presented as the policy problem). The perceptions of dependency are not only classed but also racialised. The restrictions on migrant social rights, backed up by the neoliberal notion of ‘deservingness’, increase the vulnerability of precarious workers, particularly migrants who are often stigmatised as fraudulent benefit claimants (Alberti 2017; Anderson 2013).

These new forms of welfare policies influence integration policies and today operate together with asylum and migration laws to control migration and perpetuate the ways in which practices of border control conjoin with social policies. Stratification of legal status increases welfare conditionality for noncitizens, whose access to welfare services is dependent on residence permits and employment (Bendixsen 2018; Corrigan 2014; Könönen 2018a; Sainsbury 2012; Shutes 2016). Even nominally legitimate migrants can, in practice, occupy legal grey zones with missing or ambivalent social rights as in the case of vulnerable EU citizens (Tervonen and Enache 2017) or EU citizens who have lost their employment or have not registered their residence. With workfare policies, unconditional social rights based on citizenship (Marshall 1950 [1992]) are replaced by certain obligations as preconditions to be accepted as a full member of society (Kymlicka and Norman 1994). Additionally, many migrant citizens pay taxes and contribute to the financing of the welfare state but lack access to social benefits. The effects of such policies on irregular migrants’ lives vary and, we argue, are partly contingent upon the specific welfare state constellation. For example, in the ‘strong’ Nordic welfare states, the close relations between individuals, social organisations and the nation-state make it harder for those who are excluded from public arrangements to get by (Khosravi 2010).

The ideology of workfare conjoined with perceptions of deservingness creates distinctions between citizens, and citizens and noncitizens. It may also contribute to the different welfare states becoming increasingly similar, as their ultimate aims, independent of the initial welfare models, digress towards controlling nation-state borders.

The articles in this SI demonstrate that welfare state bordering is produced and operationalised by (1) the move from universal to individualisation of rights in which (2) the egalitarian conception of justice is replaced not only by an idea of ‘justice as reciprocity’ (Kildal 2011) but also by the concept of ‘justice as deservingness’, which is racialised and contributes to blurring the distinction between migrants and citizens, (3) brings along the increased role of NGOs and the use of alternative support structures and (4) has violent effects.

First, the workfare and neoliberal turn of welfare contributes to the construction of a hierarchical system of civic stratification. Indeed, welfare state bordering concerns not only migrants but also citizens. It signals a move away from a welfare state based on equality to one based on differentiation (Bendixsen 2018) and to the broader individualisation of rights rather than the ideal of universality. The individualisation of rights means that, in practice, access to rights depends on an assessment of the individual’s position (in the labour market, social networks etc.) and/or characteristics and skills (such as language skills, knowledge of rights, vulnerability, deservingness). This special issue shows the effects of workfare, neoliberal and market orientation of social policies on bordering practices and on the resulting experiences of migrants (see especially Anderson 2024; Bendixsen and Eriksen 2024; Riedner and Hess 2024).

Second, the concept of individualised rights draws attention to the ad hocness and randomness of accessing social services and rights compared with the equal rights based on membership, which is commonly considered characteristic of encompassing welfare states. The more egalitarian conception of justice during the 1970s was gradually replaced by the idea of ‘justice as reciprocity’ in the 1980s and 1990s, when ideas of ‘personal responsibility’ were promoted (Kildal 2011). We argue that with the individualisation of rights and the salience of deservingness attitudes (Kroll and Blomberg 2011) characterising the policies and the relation between the street-level bureaucrats and welfare recipients, we see a move from ‘justice as reciprocity’ to ‘justice as deservingness’. This special issue suggests the racialisation in the perception of the deservingness of welfare recipients that seeps in as the policies are implemented at the local level. Indeed, the move towards greater individualisation of rights can also be recognised in street-level encounters in which bureaucrats exercise their discretionary power guided by professional identity and personal values. Inclusion and exclusion from social services become dependent upon how street-level bureaucrats interpret regulations (Schiller 2016; see also Nordberg and Wrede 2015) and the racialised logic of deservingness. While social workers sometimes become unwittingly involved in welfare state bordering as they access applications for social welfare assistance, some ‘disrupt’ (Bendixsen 2018) or ‘destabilise’ (Nordling 2017) the exclusionary borders through highlighting the precariousness of an individual’s situation (Misje 2020), sometimes act as compassionate civil servants (Ambrosini 2017) and other times are shaped by the racialised deservingness rhetoric (Riedner and Hess 2024). The logic of deservingness also shakes the naturalised migration versus citizen distinction (Anderson 2024; Riedner and Hess 2024).

Third, one consequence of welfare state bordering is the increased role of NGOs, often partly funded by the state, in offering various services to irregular migrants in different European countries (Bendixsen and Wyller 2019; Misje 2020; Nordberg and Wrede 2015; Van der Leun and Bouter 2015). The minimum rights approach, i.e. limiting migrants’ access to social rights and services to a minimum, enhances the risk that they become involved in informal work arrangements and compels people to rely on alternative support structures that are provisional, limited and contingent on kinship or other networks (Sager 2011), such as informal social infrastructures (Näre, Bendixsen, and Maury 2024). NGO funding is commonly precarious and project-based, which leads to selectivity in terms of service provision (Misje 2020). Migrants are then forced to turn to informal social networks for support (Mingot and Mazzucato 2019; Näre, Bendixsen, and Maury 2024; Näre and Maury 2024). While a parallel service structure provides important services for irregular migrants, it also contributes to keeping groups of people outside the state-funded safety net, normalising their precarity (Karlsen 2021). Moreover, offering noncitizen services within a humanitarian framework, rather than based on their social rights as members of a political community, can enhance their vulnerability (Ticktin 2011). When welfare states limit rights to those who are vulnerable, individuals may respond by strategically becoming or remaining vulnerable in order to access to social rights and residence or to prevent deportation.

Fourth, migration governance that prevents the mobility of certain categories of people has violent effects and paradoxically ends up enforcing mobility, thus adding to individuals’ marginality and precarity. Indeed, providing limited or minimum rights has been understood as a form of indirect violence (Valenta and Thorshaug 2011), benevolent violence (Barker 2017), minimalist biopolitics (Johansen 2013), necroviolence (Lindberg 2020), structural violence (Davies, Isakjee, and Dhesi 2017), bureaucratic violence (Näre 2020b) and a form of violence integral to welfare states, producing hierarchies of belonging (Bendixsen 2018; Lindberg 2020).

The contributions of the articles in this issue

The article by Lisa Riedner and Sabine Hess contributes to the literature on the precarisation of intra-EU movers in contemporary European welfare states. In Germany, the welfare state has moved from a conservative welfare state towards a neoliberal welfare state, in which activating labour market policies are a central element in social policies. The focus of social protection has shifted from poverty relief to crime prevention. The authors examine how street-level bureaucrats implement the new regulations and make use of racialised concepts in their discretionary decision-making and how intra-EU movers are forced into low-wage work to access social and residency rights and to avoid deportation.

The authors argue that the German social system has moved from meritocracy towards a racialised logic. This establishes workfare-state borders, where social policy is used as a tool of mobility control, not only targeting the ‘migrant’. Indeed, the entanglement between social policy, mobility control and processes of racialisation demonstrates the need to refocus away from the ‘migrant’ to the process by which some groups are ‘migrantised’ or ‘re-migrantised’.

The article by Lena Näre and Olivia Maury illustrates welfare state bordering and the individualisation of the welfare state. They analyse the production of precarity through the complex interplay between migration and welfare regimes in questions related to work, residence and access to welfare services. Their article draws on ethnographic research among two groups of temporary migrants, asylum seekers and non-EU student-migrants, who are noncitizen residents with pending residence applications or non-permanent residence permits in Southern Finland. They develop the notion of bureaucratic bordering to capture the complexity of what the research participants term ‘the system’, in other words, the opaque, changing and many times faceless bureaucratic complex of the Finnish welfare state.

Their findings suggest that temporary migrants need to navigate and challenge both the border and the welfare system in the interstices of institutions, welfare logics, street-level bureaucrats and personal connections. Asylum-seekers with pending or rejected asylum cases struggle against bureaucratic bordering related to the strict conditions of labour-based permits, while non-EU student-migrants struggle to renew their temporary student permits while they are allowed to only work part-time for a certain number of hours per week in addition to their studies. Thus, noncitizens’ precarity is emphasised by several temporal regimes: time limits are constitutive in the residence permit system both in the length of the permit itself, in the length of the application process and in the temporal constraints included in specific permit types (see also Maury 2022).

Synnøve Bendixsen and Thomas Hylland Eriksen’s article examines the ways in which the precarious subject position of irregular migrants is produced by the Norwegian welfare state. Drawing on long-term fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants of different nationalities in Norway, they examine governmental conduct by welfare state borders using the concepts of precarity, (digital) bordering, slow violence, and temporal power as interconnected and causing exclusion among irregular migrants. They examine how a strong welfare state such as Norway uses welfare rights as a technique to control and manage irregular migration and to produce ideas of deservingness and an inclusion/exclusion dynamic. They explain how governance of migration through limiting, differentiating or denying services establishes a hierarchical conception of the human.

Bendixsen and Eriksen argue that the digitalisation of the welfare state both enables and bears witness to the neo-liberalisation of the welfare state. This neoliberalisation, of which the digitalised technology of control is one part, and its subsequent intensified individualism contribute to perpetrating slow violence on people who do not have full rights. The violence inflicted upon irregular migrants indicates more encompassing changes to what has long been perceived as a universal and egalitarian Norwegian welfare state. The leaking of migration management into welfare state practices contributes to reducing the position of egalitarianism as a principle and value, transforming the welfare state in the process.

Bridget Anderson’s article provides a succinct argument for denaturalising the citizenship-migrant binary. She outlines the fantasy quality of citizenship and how citizenship is an imaginary holder containing a promise of rights and inclusion but which, in practice, comes with increasingly limited legal, social and practical value for its holders. Anderson’s article emphasises that welfare state bordering is not only about migration management and control but also an ordinary part of the governance of its population.

Anderson discusses how those applying for citizenship in the UK are expected to be of impeccable moral standing, while the same requirements are not expected by natural-born citizens, the banal citizens. She demonstrates how citizenship in the UK is being hollowed out as its social content has become tied to a number of restrictions and expectations, and the benefits of citizenship are withheld from those considered as underserving or unable to live up to its demands. Thus, both citizenship as a normative status and the policy and practices of citizenship as providing legal rights are fantastical.

The analysis of welfare state bordering helps reveal that the right to reside is not sufficient. Welfare state bordering needs to be understood in the wider context of the neoliberalisation of citizenship (Näre 2016), its racialisation dynamics and the individualisation of the welfare state. Curtailing access to the welfare state will contribute to the precarity of noncitizens.

In closing, we want to express our sincere hope that the articles in this issue can be read as an invitation for migration and welfare state scholars to engage in a closer dialogue in the future. It is only by adopting the perspective of the migrants and/or marginalised citizens that the promise of universality of advanced welfare states can be critically assessed.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The research on which this article is based on is funded by Tackling Precarious and Informal Work in the Nordic countries (PrecaNord, 2022-2026) funded by the Future Challenges in the Nordics Programme.