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.
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.
Sanctions are payment cuts that case managers implement in order to discipline welfare recipients. Previous research suggests that immigrants face a particularly high risk to receive such reductions, primarily due to the prevalence of stereotyping in street‐level bureaucracy. The study contributes to this literature with help of a triangulation between in‐depth interviews, survey data and administrative records for the case of the German social assistance system. Our findings indicate that immigrants tend to be sanctioned at a lower rate than other benefit recipients in this context, especially if they arrived at the country only recently on grounds of international protection. This finding can be explained by the importance of reciprocity and control in the country's ‘Bismarckian’ welfare state. Our qualitative data shows that case managers exert a considerable level of agency over the implementation process. This discretion is, on the one hand, used to discipline benefit recipients who are perceived as having contributed little to the welfare system as a whole through taxes and social insurance contributions. Those who are considered to have limited control over their labour market position, on the other hand, are given a certain degree of leeway. We therefore conclude, against the background of the current street‐level bureaucracy literature, that immigration can also act as a deservingness cue in means‐tested social assistance, given that the benefit system is embedded into a welfare regime in which labour market participation, work‐testing and social insurance contributions are the dominating principles of eligibility.
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