Queuing for food and playing lottery for beds: a parallel social service system and the lived experiences of humanitarian service provision to homeless EU migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

This article analyses humanitarian social service provision to homeless EU migrants in Oslo, Norway. Most of these migrants have no or weak affiliations with the formal labour market, resulting in restricted rights to public welfare services. Recent years have seen an upsurge of humanitarian services such as basic healthcare, food, shelter, and sanitary facilities, provided through nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Nevertheless, availability is limited; thus, with the intention of securing fairness in a context where resources are scarce, service providers create strategies for restriction of access and queue management. The different services are spread out within the city, making migrants spend considerable time moving between them in their struggles to get basic needs met. Taking an afternoon spent with Bogdan, a Romanian man navigating several services, as my point of departure, I explore how humanitarian social service provision to homeless EU migrants simultaneously alleviates migrants’ precarious situations and regulates their everyday lives. The concept of the humanitarian administration of time is introduced to call attention to this duality. A main contention is that a parallel social service system, taking on a bordering function, is emerging in Oslo.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanitarian exceptionalism
• bordering
• temporalities
• EU migrants
• Norway

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to all the individuals and organizations that contributed to my research. Thank you to Jacob Lind, Hans Morten Haugen, Norma Montesino, Maria Persdotter, Erica Righard, Marianne Rugkåsa and the two anonymous reviewers for valuable and insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

The author reports no potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. All names and some details throughout have been altered or omitted to ensure anonymity. The study was approved by the Norwegian Centre for Research Data (NSD). Consent was obtained from all involved. Opening hours, house rules, systems for managing access, and locations are depicted as they were during my fieldwork.

2. There are 55 beds. Upon securing a bed, one gets a five-day reservation. Beds without reservation are up for lottery. The shelter for women and couples, having 79 beds, has a similar system.

3. I employ the term migrants with precarious citizenship statuses (cf. Lafleur and Mescoli 2018) when talking of this larger group to avoid connotations of illegality.

4. The term employed in municipal documents.

5. No reliable estimation of the number of homeless EU migrants in Norway or Oslo exists (Djuve et al. 2015; Johansen 2016). Studies suggest that the number of migrants who beg has remained stable since 2013 (Engebrigtsen and Haug 2018).

6. Some daytime low-threshold services originally aimed at Norwegian substance users, welcome homeless EU migrants. The shelters are strictly for members of the welfare state.

7. Oslo’s grant scheme is aimed at providing shelters and sanitary facilities, while the national scheme also targets ‘long-term projects’ including work-training. A small minority of projects receiving funding are directed at employment (Engebrigtsen and Haug 2018). There are considerable variations within and between the NGOs who form part of the parallel social service system regarding whether they consider humanitarian service provision their primary aim. Many engage in advocacy work, challenging policies towards homeless EU migrants (Karlsen 2015; Misje 2020).

8. See Misje (2020) on ‘legal residence’ within Norwegian social welfare legislation.

Additional information

Funding

The author is a PhD candidate at VID Specialized University, which has funded this study.