Beyond welfare chauvinism and deservingness. Rationales of belonging as a conceptual framework for the politics and governance of migrants’ rights

Emma Carmel, Bozena Sojka

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Abstract

This article argues that the politics and governance of migrants’ rights needs to be reframed. In particular, the terms “welfare chauvinism”, and deservingness should be replaced. Using a qualitative transnational case study of policymakers in Poland and the UK, we develop an alternative approach. In fine-grained and small-scale interpretive analysis, we tease out four distinct rationales of belonging that mark out the terms and practices of social membership, as well as relative positions of privilege and subordination. These rationales of belonging are: temporal-territorial, ethno-cultural, labourist, and welfareist. Importantly, these rationales are knitted together by different framings of the transnational contexts, within which the politics and governance of migration and social protection are given meaning. The rationales of belonging do not exist in isolation, but in each country, they qualify each other in ways that imply different politics and governance of migrants’ rights. Taken together, these rationales of belonging generate justifications for migrant inclusion that are stratified by class, gender and ethnicity as well as transnational projects of social exclusion.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)645-667
JournalJournal of Social Policy
Volume50
Issue number3
Early online date24 Jul 2020
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 31 Jul 2021

Funding

The research on which this article is based was funded by the NORFACE Welfare State Futures programme (grant number: --). The research was developed in the TRANSWEL project on Mobile Welfare in a Transnational Europe, led by Prof Anna Amelina. The initial analysis of the interviews was directed and supervised by Prof Ann Runfors, Florence Fröhlig and Maarja Saar. We are grateful to our participants for their time and consideration in sharing their views and experiences with us.

Keywords

  • welfare chauvinism,
  • migrant rights,
  • deservingness,
  • migration,
  • EU free movement,
  • governance,
  • UK,
  • Poland

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