Who Belongs, and How Far? Refugees and Bureaucrats Within the German Active Welfare State

Katrin Menke,Andrea Rumpel

doi:10.17645/si.v9i4.4646

Abstract

Concepts such as “belonging” (Yuval‐Davis, 2011) and “community of value” (Anderson, 2013) try to capture the multiple ways of classifying migrants. In this article, we argue that belonging needs to be analyzed against the backdrop of active social citizenship in European welfare states. Although the literature acknowledges the increasing links between migration and social policies, the latest “turn to activation” in social policy has hardly been accounted for. By focusing on two policy fields in Germany, the labor market and health policies, we briefly describe discourses and social right entitlements and their ambivalences. Empirically we show (a) how bureaucrats within the two policy fields regulate and justify refugees’ social rights in practice and (b) how refugees act vis‐à‐vis relevant institutional opportunity structures. Our study contributes to previous research twofold: Firstly, we illustrate processes of positioning and selecting refugees that stem from recent social policy architecture. Secondly, we demonstrate everyday experiences from refugees’ vis‐á‐vis relevant institutional opportunity structures in Germany. Our results show that inconsistencies within and between social policy fields of one welfare state have to be taken into consideration for further national and transnational research.

Highlights

Consistent with a demigrantization of migration research, an emerging strand in migration studies focuses on how migrants are societally “produced” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012; Morris, 2020)
We argue that active social citizenship estab‐ lishes specific norms of belonging and produces differen‐ tial forms of inclusion for refugees, who are confronted with additional challenges
While our empirical research is based on these concepts of belonging, we connect our findings of certain rationales of belonging with an active social cit‐ izenship as a recent context () in the German wel‐ fare state

Summary

Introduction

Consistent with a demigrantization of migration research, an emerging strand in migration studies focuses on how migrants are societally “produced” (Mezzadra & Neilson, 2012; Morris, 2020). Concepts such as “belonging” (Yuval‐Davis, 2011) and “community of value” (Anderson, 2013) try to capture the complex and dynamic ways of “producing” and classifying migrants. Our study makes two contributions to previous research: Firstly, we examine the question of which refugees belong, how much they belong, under which conditions, and how this is related to recent social policy paradigms. With our empirical examples of female and substance‐using refugees, we disclose interconnec‐ tions between different levels of migration and inte‐ gration policies as well as the activation paradigm and demonstrate refugees’ everyday experiences

Methods

Discussion

Conclusion