Identity Game for Welfare: Circumventing Surveillance of Legal Migrants in Europe

Abstract

Based on a critical ethnographic research, this paper aims to reflect on the role of welfare surveillance and outsourced social services in migration procedures of Central European Roma. After the fifth EU Enlargement in 2007, transnational mobility has become a significant challenge for all western governments. As full EU citizens, large Roma populations now enjoy freedom of movement in Europe. The long standing prejudiced perception of Roma as profiteers unwilling to integrate became a basis for concerns about a “threatening flood” of Roma westward. As a result, several old Member States have introduced different control strategies allegedly to ensure security, legitimating excessive policing and surveillance of migrants in order to isolate them from national consensus. The “mechanisms” applied for sorting and excluding unwanted Roma communities are grounded in a set of punitive rules enacted through national and local legislation with the purpose of expulsion. Accordingly, limiting access to social services gradually replaced migration policies as a new process of selection regarding undesired European migrants from A8 countries. Service providers in the neoliberal bureaucratic social fields introduced new modalities of surveillance and restrictions to deny income assistance, benefit entitlement and legal aid. This chapter provides an empirical analysis on the effects of these sorting measures and on how the targeted groups either comply or circumnavigate these regulations in London.