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"SOCIAL SERVICES ACCESS"
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Conceptualising the Role of Deservingness in Migrants’ Access to Social Services
This ‘state-of-the art’ article on the role of deservingness in governing migrants’ access to social services situates our themed section’s contribution to the literature at the intersection between the study of street-level bureaucracy and practices of internal bordering through social policy. Considering the increasing relevance of migration control post-entry, we review the considerations that guide the local delivery of social services. Among others, moral ideas about a claimant’s worthiness to receive social benefits and services guide policy implementation. But while ideas of deservingness help to understand how perceptions of migrants’ claiming play out in practice, we observe limited use of the concept in street-level bureaucracy research. Drawing on theorisations from welfare attitudinal research, we demonstrate the salience of deservingness attitudes in understanding the dynamics of local social service delivery to migrant clients.
Journal Article
Deserving of Social Support? Street-Level Bureaucrats’ Decisions on EU Migrants’ Benefit Claims in Germany
Migration raises the question of how street-level bureaucrats treat non-citizens when it comes to the distribution of limited welfare resources. Based on a German case study, this article reveals how local social administrators rationalise practices of inclusion in and exclusion from social assistance receipt and associated labour market integration services for mobile EU citizens, who are perceived first and foremost as ‘foreigners’. The findings from fifty-five qualitative interviews with job centre representatives show how politics of exclusion are justified by nationalistic and ethnic criteria of membership. Insofar as EU migrants are considered outsiders to the imagined welfare community of their host country, they are seen as less deserving than German-born claimants. However, mobile EU citizens can earn their legitimacy to access benefit receipt through sustained participation in the host society, demonstrating knowledge of the German language and societal norms so as to appear ‘German’. Such a cultural performance-based logic of deservingness tends to be intertwined with nationality-based and racialising stereotypes of welfare fraud to frame exclusionary practice.
Journal Article
Mixed Services and Mediated Deservingness: Access to Housing for Migrants in Greece
As the delivery of social services is increasingly carried out by contractors, it is no longer state officials alone who determine clients’ ‘deservingness’. This article draws attention to the interrelated notions of mixed services and mediated deservingness as they apply in the context of migrants’ access to housing in Athens, Greece, during the so-called ‘migration crisis’ of 2015-2017. It argues that non-state actors essentially act as intermediaries between the state and the migrant clients, making their own judgements on the migrants’ deservingness and using their discretionary power accordingly. The findings reveal distinct discretionary patterns among street-level actors who represent migrants, depending on how each interprets the notion of ‘vulnerability’ with regard to gender and age. Although these actors’ room for manoeuvre is framed by the policy framework and the structural conditions in which they operate, their individual normative assumptions play a critical role in shaping their discretionary behaviour towards migrants.
Journal Article
Introduction: The (Un)Deserving Migrant? Street-Level Bordering Practices and Deservingness in Access to Social Services
Our collection of articles makes original contributions to three distinct, yet at times overlapping, strands of literature: a) studies of social policy implementation at the street-level, which have examined access to welfare benefits but less often access to social services, b) studies of the welfare state and immigration nexus, and how it functions in practice, and c) the emerging field of enquiry within critical migration studies around internal bordering. At these crossroads, we contend that the notion of deservingness is key in determining migrants’ access to social services, acknowledging the need to go beyond the binary of the deserving/undeserving migrant yet not discarding the notion altogether (Carmel and Sojka, 2020). We see our collective contribution as advancing our understanding of what specific criteria underpin judgements of deservingness. This includes uncovering the moral hierarchies that social agents construct around claimant groups and through which they entrench internal bordering processes.
Journal Article
Constructions of Undeservingness around the Figure of the Undocumented Pregnant Woman in the French Department of Mayotte
This article examines how Comorian pregnant women in Mayotte, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, came to embody an unwanted presence as irregular migrants due to their children’s and their own potential claims to belonging, while they are entitled by law to access perinatal and maternal care. This article argues that framing undocumented pregnant women as a threat led to significant shortcomings in perinatal care delivery and that those shortages in turn worsened access to healthcare services for the Mahoran-French population as well, exacerbating feelings of resentment towards Comorians. Drawing on this case-study, the article foregrounds the malleability of the CARIN criteria (Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need), a theoretical tool to analyse ideas related to deservingness, by demonstrating how actors re-think the meanings of ‘identity’, ‘control’, ‘attitude’ and ‘need’ and assign different weights to them in the context of a dominant frame of undeservingness.
Journal Article
Sick and Vulnerable Migrants in French Public Hospitals. The Administrative and Budgetary Dimension of Un/Deservingness
This article explores how staff in French public hospitals are indirectly involved in the governing of migration through healthcare. It unpacks the construction of differentiated values of life assigned to specific categories of vulnerable (authorised and unauthorised) migrants according to their perceived un/deservingness in context of budgetary restrictions. This context emphasises tensions between medical and administrative staff in the decision-making process regarding access to healthcare. The analysis rests upon empirical data (participant observations and semi-directed interviews) gathered in ‘healthcare access units’ located in public hospitals. Perceptions of un/deservingness lead to both healthcare rationing and healthcare denial and are built upon entangled criteria related to both migration status and budgetary concerns. These mechanisms reveal the administrative and budgetary dimensions that underlie the perceptions of health-related un/deservingness, which is linked to the costs of healthcare: the higher the costs, the less likely patients are to be designated to be deserving of healthcare.
Journal Article
Deservingness and Uneven Geographies of Asylum Accommodation
The arrival of over six million asylum seekers in Europe since 2011 has engendered profound and ongoing governance transformations, which this article examines through the understudied perspective of asylum seekers’ accommodation. The article uncovers the unevenness of accommodation standards across reception centres in an Italian province, demonstrating how this heterogeneity selectively dis/enables the meaningful participation of asylum seekers in the social life of communities surrounding them. Second, it reveals how the circulation of asylum seekers across these facilities responds to performance-based deservingness criteria. Deservingness functions as a disciplining mechanism that mediates access to better forms of accommodation.
Journal Article
Deserving the Right to Work? Immigration Officials and the Work Permit in Germany
This article investigates the role of deservingness conceptions in the implementation of labour market access policies for migrants with precarious legal status. It explores how immigration officials frame the deservingness of work permit applicants, considering also the political, legal and societal context in which they work. The analysis takes account of the Control, Attitude, Reciprocity, Identity and Need (CARIN) criteria, and uses primary data of semi-structured interviews with senior officials in German municipal immigration offices. It finds that officials frequently employ deservingness frames inbuilt into the relevant parts of the law, but also behavioural norms that go beyond legal requirements. The article makes two main contributions. Providing empirical insight into the migration bureaucracy’s part in the implementation of labour market policy, it seeks to help advance understanding of the complex processes of differential in- and exclusion in countries of immigration. Furthermore, the research design allows putting the CARIN criteria to an empirical test.
Journal Article
Deservingness in Judicial Discourse. An Analysis of the Legal Reasoning Adopted in Dutch Case Law on Irregular Migrant Families’ Access to Shelter
In September 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court upheld a judgment of the Hague Court of Appeal that the eviction from basic shelter of a mother and her minor children, who did not have legal residence in the Netherlands, was unlawful. This ruling was instigated by a radically new interpretation of the European Social Charter’s personal scope and caused a major shift in Dutch policy. This article provides a case study into the legal reasoning adopted by the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court. It argues that, instead of relying on legal doctrinal reasoning for justifying the outcome, both courts referred to factors that the general public relies on to assess people’s deservingness of welfare. This finding raises fundamental questions about the relationship between human rights law and deservingness; and calls, therefore, for further research into the relevance of deservingness criteria in judicial discourse.
Journal Article