Accessing welfare rights in Belgium: between street-level bureaucracy and immigrants’ agency

The access to welfare benefits is critical for many immigrants as it helps to provide
resources that can be essential to the incorporation in society. Such access depends
on the interactions between immigrants, the system of rules and regulations
governing welfare rights, and the front-line workers who translate rules into concrete
decisions. As a huge corpus of literature has shown, discretion operates at the streetlevel
in the process of allocation of rights. Front-line workers have room to facilitate
immigrants’ integration, or to make it more difficult. While studies have shown the
influence of stereotypes and social norms in shaping the decision of front-line
workers, few have addressed how immigrants experience these interactions. What are
the consequences of social workers’ decisions for immigrants’ integration? What are
the strategies that immigrants develop to deal with such consequences and to
cultivate a form of agency when interacting with social workers?
This presentation addresses these questions building on a set of qualitative interviews
conducted with both social workers and immigrant beneficiaries in Wallonia and
Brussels (Belgium). It contributes to an analysis “from below” of immigrants’ access
to welfare benefits in the host country. We will first introduce the perspective of
social workers and analyze how they assess the needs and the situation of the
newcomers – also in terms of deservingness (or not) of the social aid. Second, it
describes how newcomers perceive the social workers’ work and the effects on their
life and which strategies they develop to try to accommodate with them.