Unpublished conference/Abstract (Scientific congresses and symposiums)The access to welfare entitlements in Belgium: Immigrants’ experiences and representations on street-level bureaucracy
Mandin, Jérémy; Reidsma, Marije; Costa Santos, Adriana
2022 • IMISCOE Annual Conference 2022: "Migration and Time: Temporalities of Mobility, Governance, and Resistance"
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IMISCOE Annual Conference 2022: "Migration and Time: Temporalities of Mobility, Governance, and Resistance"
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ABSTRACT
Immigrants’ access to welfare is characterized by an important symbolic dimension as political discourses in Western countries often depict immigrants as ‘welfare abusers’. Building on the literature about street-level bureaucracy, research has described how such moral categories can influence social workers’ assessment of immigrants’ ‘deservingness’ and impact the access to benefits. Less work has been done about immigrants’ experiences and representations regarding the welfare system. Building on a corpus of 90 interviews conducted with newly arrived immigrants registered to Belgian welfare agencies, the paper studies their expectations about the Belgian welfare system. It explores how immigrants represent themselves and their use of welfare benefits. In contradiction with the stereotypes of the ‘welfare abusers’, this research portrays that work remains a central aspiration for newcomers and that the use of welfare benefit is largely considered as a temporary and undesirable situation sometimes associated with experience of downward social mobility. It also dwells on individuals’ own categorizations of ‘deservingness’ that can differ from those of social workers. Finally, the paper describes how beneficiaries perceive the role of social workers and the power dynamics of activation policies. It appears that – while rules are not necessarily perceived as unfair –, the perceptions on the work of social workers differs over a set of variables (availability, proactivity, willingness to share complete information). By considering the experience of the immigrants, this paper proposes an original contribution to the street-level bureaucracy literature by bringing new analytical perspectives to the notion of ‘deservingness’.
