Social work and welfare bordering: the case of homeless EU migrants in Norway

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the emergent European-wide conversation questioning the nation-state as the given unit of analysis for social work theory and practice through exploring encounters between migrants with precarious citizenship statuses, specifically homeless EU migrants, and social workers in Norway. It contends that the Norwegian social work profession has yet to engage critically with the exclusionary potential inherent in its self-identification as a welfare state profession. Paying attention to how homeless EU migrants are increasingly demarcated as ‘illegal’ in Norwegian welfare legislation, I argue for the aptness of employing the analytical lens of ‘welfare bordering’ when analysing encounters between these migrants and social workers. Building on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, the analysis further suggests that even social workers not mandated with administering public social welfare provisions get entangled in welfare bordering, at times enacting the border themselves. While social workers actively attempt to contest the exclusionary mechanisms of the welfare state in individual cases, such attempts might not challenge the migrants’ general exclusion from public welfare services per se, leaving homeless EU migrants in Norway dependent on welfare structures based on empathy and charity rather than realisation of rights.