‘ARE WE GOING TO STAY REFUGEES?’ Hyper-precarious Processes in and Beyond the Danish Integration Programme

Abstract

The Danish welfare state is designed to protect and support people in need. However, refugees experience hyper-precarity related to a restrictive socio-legal regime connecting them to the state. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around a local community organisation, including 35 qualitative interviews with refugees, social workers and volunteers, the article examines hyper-precarious processes constituted by a nexus of immigration and labour regimes. Theoretically, the article draws on the concepts of precarity and social navigation, which centre the analysis on the interface of agency and moving social forces, while advocating for an analysis sensitive to context-specific variations of everyday practice. By empirically exploring how refugees navigate complex state connections and expectations of self-reliance articulated in the Integration Programme, the article contributes to an understanding of hyper-precarity as ambiguous processes producing subjectivities of not only victimisation and despair but also fragile spaces of sociality, hope and resistance in rural contexts.

Parental care in trajectories of forced migration: Ruptures and changing conditions for family life

“…Furthermore, the conceptualization of parental care as performed in social practices expands our understanding of parental care beyond the parent–child relationship. Thus, the analysis contributes to a de‐individualization and contextualization of parenthood as shaped by historical structures and political struggle, also coined with the concept of hyper‐precarious processes in the everyday life of refugees (Shapiro & Jørgensen, 2021). This understanding can hopefully inspire and enable social workers to tune into and respectfully explore the perspective of children and parents on both their personal and collective experiences of their migratory trajectory and resettlement process.…”

“…The increasing number of people seeking asylum challenged the reception systems of European nation states and gave rise to political crises (c.f. Sandberg, 2018; Vandevoordt & Verschraegen, 2019) that the Danish government attempted to manage by adopting more than 100 restrictions of the immigration and integration laws, producing hyper‐precarious conditions for refugees in the integration programme (Shapiro & Jørgensen, 2021). In this article, I explore how involuntary movements of families between asylum centres and the geographical dispersal law from 1999 spreading refugees around the country upon acceptance (Larsen, 2010) constitute conditions for parental care in the conduct of everyday family in the resettlement process.…”

“…The financial situation of the single headed household was strained, because the financial support for unemployed refugees was at a minimum in political efforts to manage the refugee situation in 2015 (Institut for Menneskerettigheder, 2018; Shapiro & Jørgensen, 2021). After Adel had supported himself by working in Turkey, he wanted to help his mother in supporting the household by collecting and claiming container deposits.…”

Translating the nation through the sustainable, liveable city: The role of social media intermediaries in immigrant integration in Copenhagen

“…As noted in the introduction, in the last two decades the integration policies previously directed only at refugees widened their target population and expanded massively in scope. While free multi-year Danish language courses are available to all migrants, the integration contract signed upon receipt of a temporary residency permit outlining a one-to-five-year-long integration programme is only mandatory for non-EU citizens 4 coming for other reasons than employment or study (Shapiro and Jørgensen, 2021). Since the focus of integration policies has been increasingly on getting migrants into employment as soon as possible so that they reach economic self-sufficiency, the main integration actors have become either private businesses or training centres with whom the municipality collaborates.…”

“The curse of the refugee”

“…This includes studies of rejected asylum seekers in Danish deportation centres (Suárez-Krabbe et al 2018). Likewise, scholars have studied how changing social welfare conditions and needs of local communities infl uence the reception and lives of people granted asylum (Eastmond 2007;Whyte et al 2019;Weiss 2020;Shapiro & Jørgensen 2021). These studies document an increased austerity within Nordic asylum and integration policies and shed light on underlying racializing assumptions and logics as well as conveying some of the consequences they produce.…”