Claiming Social Assistance in Court. Irregular Migrants, Public Institutions and the Law in French-Speaking Belgium

Mainly focused on the vulnerabilities of migrants with a precarious legal status, current scholarship on irregular migration insists on their daily tactics and informal strategies of survival outside of, or hidden from the state. Through the specific case of social assistance in French-speaking Belgium, this paper explores the ways in which irregular(ized) migrants mobilize public services in order to gain access to healthcare or financial assistance, sometimes even taking their request to court. Building on ethnographic fieldwork within welfare bureaucracies, legal aid offices and NGOs, I ask what kind of claims these migrants make to the state and its institutions, how they build their cases and understand their (social) rights. I use case-studies in order to show the crucial role of lawyers, legal aid clinics and social workers in helping migrants bring their case to court in order to question the restrictive character of recent policies and administrative guidelines, on which the (negative) decisions of local welfare offices are based. These case-studies will help reflect on irregular migrants’ relationship to, and engagement with the state, and delve into the role and the effects of the judicialization of social assistance in a context where litigants are excluded from political representation.