Abstract
This paper presents the findings from a small-scale pilot study which explores the experiences of accessing welfare benefits by the migrant Roma European Union (EU) citizens in the UK. It compares administrative barriers and individuals’ knowledge of welfare entitlement both prior and after the implementation of changes to the welfare regime in 2014, when a tranche of ‘policy hardening’ legal enactments came into force. For the migrants who participated in this study, precarious, low paid post-migration work has brought several hazards, including a non-eligibility for certain social protections and an inability to demonstrate documentation which enable access to ‘passported’ welfare benefits. The combination of problems in accessing welfare benefits and the resulting state interventions, including expulsion from the UK in some cases, suggest that EU Roma citizens experience disproportionate negative impacts of welfare hardening, adding to the much vaunted ‘hostile environment’ to EU migrants in the wake of the Brexit vote. As such, we find the practice of ‘bordering’ migrant EU Roma citizens to the UK is taking place through covert state enforcement action against families and households, discouraging effective and genuine use of their free movement rights guaranteed under European Union law.
Highlights
This paper examines the experiences of Roma European Union (EU) citizens resident in the UK and asks whether explicit anti-migrant discourse (Cap, 2017), widespread public scepticism towards the benefits of migration1, and policy ‘hardening’ (British Social Attitudes 31, 2014; Hopkins, 2017) towards EU migrants, in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote (Khaleeli, 2016) have coalesced so as to disproportionately impact ‘bordered’2 and socially excluded Roma EU citizens, who mainly arrived to the UK from the so-called Eastern European countries
Building upon the findings from our pilot report (Dagilyte and Greenfields, forthcoming 2018) and on the data on de facto deportations (Home Office, 2017a), or expulsions6 of EU citizens (Mantu et al, 2017), we suggest that EU Roma citizens and their families may experience high barriers to demonstrate their entitlement to welfare benefits, in result impacting on their residence rights and migration intentions, as well as diminishing their trust in state agencies
The discussion on administrative removals emerged in several interviews. This is worrying, as the policy consists of practices of tacit bordering and policing by state agencies, which operate to ‘encourage’ return migration of EU Roma citizens to their home countries, in contradiction to EU law which will continue to apply throughout the transitional period before Brexit
Summary
This paper examines the experiences of Roma European Union (EU) citizens resident in the UK and asks whether explicit anti-migrant discourse (Cap, 2017), widespread public scepticism towards the benefits of migration, and policy ‘hardening’ (British Social Attitudes 31, 2014; Hopkins, 2017) towards EU migrants, in the wake of the 2016 Brexit vote (Khaleeli, 2016) have coalesced so as to disproportionately impact ‘bordered’ and socially excluded Roma EU citizens, who mainly arrived to the UK from the so-called Eastern European countries. Next to the intersectional interplay between ethnicity, nationality and gender (Vrăbiescu and Kalir, 2018), Roma EU citizens who arrived in the UK after 2004 bring to the host countries new and additional policy challenges based on class and socio-economic status, which may be different to those faced by the ‘older migrant’ Roma communities, as the research on Gitanos/Roma in Spain illustrates (Magazzini and Piemontese, 2016) In this context, while focusing on this particular population sample, we acknowledge the problematic use of the homogenising term ‘Eastern European Roma migrants’ in public discourse: it is a social/political construction that fails to acknowledge individual migration stories and experiences and assumes a possible simplified policy ‘quick fix’, without seeking to understand meaningfully the various communities and the socio-economic challenges they face (Magazzini and Piemontese, 2016; Vrăbiescu and Kalir, 2018). This is followed by the overview on how our empirical research study was designed and conducted, proceeding to highlight the key findings and offering conclusions on the institutional ‘bordering’ EU Roma citizens via the hostile welfare state policies and such migrants’ eventual voluntary or enforced returns from the UK
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