Turning citizens into immigrants: state practices of welfare ‘cancellations’ and document retention among EU nationals living in Glasgow

ABSTRACT

This article examines the everyday experiences of welfare provision among EU migrants living in Glasgow, demonstrating how the process of restricting the rights of EU citizens has occurred well before Brexit. It is based on 12 months of ethnographic research conducted in 2012 with Czech and Slovak nationals who came to the UK after 2004. Introducing the migrants’ notion of zkancelovali, the paper highlights a heightened sense of insecurity in their everyday lives, which arises from the increasingly common experiences of rejections of their benefit applications and payment delays. Various state practices are discussed which raise questions about the limits of EU citizenship and show how the latter is affected not only through policies and discourses but also in everyday encounters with state officials, where boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’ are being redrawn. Drawing on sociological/anthropological perspectives on state, it is argued that the migrants’ experiences of welfare provision can be considered as constitutive of statecraft and nation-building processes, processes which turn (EU) citizens into immigrants.

KEYWORDS:

• EU migration
• welfare provision
• sanctions
• statecraft
• racism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The term ‘A8' or ‘accession 8' refers to eight countries that acceded the EU in 2004; these were Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia. I use quotation marks for the expressions “A8 migrants” and “A8 migration” to problematise their homogenising and essentialising tendencies with regard to individuals coming from these countries and their movements.

2 A pseudonym.

3 Complex cases included all those that required legal advice which Groundworks staff were unqualified to provide, e.g. for lodging formal appeals, legal representation in courts.

4 Although Paterson et al.’s report exclusively focused on Roma migrants, as I found during fieldwork, document retention and more broadly welfare ‘cancellations' extended also to non-Roma migrants. This does not mean that Roma migrants were treated in the same way as their non-Roma counterparts when dealing with welfare authorities, especially in face-to-face encounters. The law centre’s report as well as a Scotsman article (Briggs 2012) highlighted a pattern of specifically abusive language and discriminatory practices of welfare state agents towards Roma in Glasgow, underpinned by racist and stereotypical assumptions about Roma people, which points to their further stigmatisation. Further research is needed to discern whether and how Roma and non-Roma EU migrants faced significantly different or structurally similar experiences of welfare provision in the city and elsewhere.

5 A brief reference to the numbers of identification documents received by the Slovak embassy in London was included in a short televised news clip titled Shame for Slovaks - non-existing children were added on passports (28 August 2012). The programme, however, had racist undertones in that it seemed to imply, through the references to specific regions in the east of the country, that it was Slovakian Roma who were ‘bringing shame on the nation'.

6 A pseudonym.

7 Garfinkel defines degradation ceremonies as the following: ‘Any communicative work between persons, whereby the public identity of an actor is transformed into something looked on as lower in the local scheme of social types' (1956, 420).

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, UK under [grant number ES/G040435/1]; and Glasgow City Council.