Abstract

While existing research has analysed the intersecting migration and social security law, which stratifies migrants’ formal social entitlements, less work has been done on the informal stratifications beyond the law that determine substantive social rights. This article illustrates the informal barriers to de facto benefit receipt that intra‐EU migrant citizens may experience when claiming social assistance in local German job centres, regardless of their manifest legal entitlements. Focussing on informal, yet commonly institutionalised practices of language discrimination, analysis of 103 qualitative, in‐depth interviews reveal recurring patterns of administrative exclusion beyond individual instances of discriminatory behaviour. The unwritten rules and everyday practices shaping administrators’ claims‐processing routines often go against what the law or administrative procedures proscribe, and could be considered as forms of discrimination. The former may be explained by institutional constraints, such as a performance‐orientedmanagement culture, legalistic claims‐processing, or superficial diversity policies. By shedding light on how inequalities in access are constructed in daily administrative practice, this article adds to existing empirical knowledge on how informal inequalities in access emerge at different stages of the benefit claiming process, in contrast to formal social rights on paper, as well as social administrations’ handling of diversity in a context of transnational social protection.

Highlights

  • Interactions with the state bureaucracy may be an unfa‐ miliar, unsettling experience for those not accustomed to the local language and the intricate functioning of the host country’s bureaucratic system

  • I disentangle some of the informal expressions of agency‐based discrimination, approach‐ ing it through the angle of language discrimination

  • The section explores how various patterns of informal administrative inclusion into, or exclusion from, de facto benefit receipt may occur during discretionary claims‐processing. It uncovers some of the underlying mechanisms, including the unawareness of EU migrants’ complex legal entitlements or their needs as newcomers to German society and bureaucracy, that serve as organi‐ sational blind spots and thereby engender discrimination

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Summary

Introduction

Interactions with the state bureaucracy may be an unfa‐ miliar, unsettling experience for those not accustomed to the local language and the intricate functioning of the host country’s bureaucratic system. The analysis focuses on the dif‐ fuse and unwritten yet systematic rules, or in other words, everyday routines and practices of benefit claims‐ processing, rather than formally codified stratified social entitlements in law The latter, legal exclusions from benefit receipt for different groups of European Union citizens, have been extensively covered elsewhere, for instance in the UK (Shutes, 2016; Shutes & Walker, 2017). This research finds that administrative pro‐ cesses of deciding on a social benefit claim are charac‐ terised by intricate patterns of de facto inclusion and exclusion at street‐level, which can emerge through administrators handling of discretion Many of these informally institutionalised, or unwritten, yet systematic practices of unequal treatment can be related either to the erroneous application of the law or the formal, legalistic application of the same rules to every bene‐ fit applicant and recipient. The findings contribute to the field by unravelling how street‐level bureaucrats deal with claimant diversity when translating administrative guide‐ lines into action, for instance justifying practices of de facto exclusion through meritocratic principles of proce‐ dural equal treatment

Methodological Note
Conceptual Backdrop
Social Security
Formal and Informal Expressions of Discrimination
Characterising Street‐level Implementation
EU Migrants’ Unequal Claiming Experiences
Informal Expressions of Language Discrimination
Explaining Intra‐EU Migrants’ Local Claiming Experiences
Findings
Discussion
Conclusion
Full Text
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