Conceptualising the Role of Deservingness in Migrants’ Access to Social Services

Abstract

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.

Negotiating Survival: Central American Refugee Women in Mexico and the Politics of Deservingness

“…On the one hand, they need to prove their deservingness through enacting a compliant, grateful, and passive victimhood, while on the other they need to be active and resist if they want to survive. This so-called "frame discrepancy" (see Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014;Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021) of reception contexts puts refugees in an impossible place, having to perform their victimhood versus enacting their survival strategies, such as being mobile and moving on to better places. Additionally, by being mobile, people risk becoming suspicious because of their excessive agency in the eye of nation-states (see Ticktin, 2006).…”

“…While mobility is a form of agency to confront violence (Willers, 2020), waiting has been discussed as a form of enforced immobility and governmentality of "hope" or "uncertainty" (Biehl, 2015, p. 69). In this sense, keeping people waiting in uncertainty has been examined as an important bordering practice, but the lack of access to social rights has received less attention and has been problematised mostly in the context of European welfare states (Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021). Yet not only the waiting, but also associated circumstances have negative effects on refugees, and severely restrict access to rights in Mexico.…”

“…In recent years, there has been a larger body of literature devoted to aspects of deservingness in everyday interactions between asylum claimants and staff at institutions providing access to rights-the so-called "streetlevel bureaucrats"-primarily in the context of welfare states (Ataҫ, 2019;Chauvin & Garcés-Mascareñas, 2014;Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021;Willen, 2012). I argue that these analyses should be extended to consider the situation of refugees in countries of transit in the Global South, which receive increasingly high numbers of refugees due to the externalisation of borders from the Global North to the Global South and where, as in the case of Mexico, access to benefits and rights is discretional and contested, mediated mostly by NGOs and international organisations.…”

“…Such a summarises caregivers' resignation to barriers to accessing rights and hierarchies to access. These rationales of exclusion, forcing and imposing rules on refugees, are manifestations of the micropolitics through which the actors on the ground take part in the governmentality of migration, as it is part of the internal bordering that affects people after entering the territory (Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021). The idea that refugees must reciprocate, return, or exchange aid for work as dependents in shelters is consistent with the ideology of humanitarianism described by Ticktin (2006), which aims to relieve the pain of the suffering and is not based on rights that allow making claims, but on mercy.…”

Who Is the Worst Migrant? Migrant Hierarchies in Populist Radical-Right Rhetoric in Estonia

“…All these practices are also at play in the field of migration. Immigrants are often (though not always) at a relative disadvantage, both economically and symbolically, compared to the host population; various social policies, which regulate access for example to healthcare, housing or the labour market, can even worsen the situation (Ratzmann & Sahraoui, 2021). Furthermore, public attitudes tend to regard migrants as less valuable than their actual societal contribution (Marchlewska et al, 2019) and, as a result, immigration and integration policies tend to be increasingly exclusive and to place additional demands and/or burdens on immigrants (Joppke, 2003;Moynihan et al, 2022).…”