Welfare Work with Immigrants and Refugees in a Social Democratic Welfare State

Trine Øland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351264426
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Social Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Welfare Work with Immigrants and Refugees in a Social Democratic Welfare State provides an ambiguous yet disturbing portrait of the inner workings of the Danish welfare state and its implications in a context of globalisation and migration.

Through a sociological interview-study with welfare workers, this book describes how processes of othering are undercurrents of welfare work. The processes construct immigrants and refugees as a kind of people who are not only culturally different but also behind, deficient and weak, and thus assigned the potential to benefit from welfare work. These processes are designated to advance a racial welfare dynamic of remedial circularity which keeps the immigrant and refugee on the threshold of modern living and democracy. It is thus depicted how welfare work is intertwined not with a biological framework but with a cultural framework naturalising and ontologising cultural differences. The book examines how welfare work tends to appreciate immigrants and refugees as dislocated people with a cultural lack and how it abides by the dictums of civilising expansions and humanitarian imperialism within the modern state.

This book will be useful for every scholar who wants to reconsider and think differently about how the welfare state is going to proceed in a global society.

Part I

Introductions

In Part I, three introductions will guide the reader into the area of welfare work with immigrants and refugees¹ in Denmark. In Chapter 1, “The stage and the centre of attention”, the main themes and objectives of the book are illustrated through the welfare worker Caroline and her assumptions about immigrants’ and refugees’ needs and lacks, and the potentials of her own professionalism to meet and amend those needs and lacks. It is described how welfare work with immigrants and refugees tends to focus on the immigrant and refugee and put the welfare workers’ actions and constructions in the shadow as if their actions were neutral or incidents of magic. However, the idea of this book is to focus on and understand welfare work’s impulse to perfect the social body and in doing so, the target group of intervention, in this case immigrants and refugees, is constructed as in need of welfare. Thus, the welfare workers’ need of the needy immigrant and refugee surfaces.

In Chapter 2, “Analytical focus and methodology”, the focus on welfare workers is substantiated by reference to the concepts of symbolic boundary work and sociation. In this way, welfare work and welfare workers are conceptualised as sociological objects to be understood. Specifically, they are understood as active powers with performative capacity in the making and remaking of society through classificatory effects which shape social positions and social opportunity. The sociological interview study that was carried out is described and it is portrayed how the interview data was analysed.

In Chapter 3, “Entering the Danish field of welfare work addressing immigrants and refugees”, the reader is guided into the welfare workers’ encounters with immigrants and refugees within the particular Danish field of welfare. The professionals who got themselves involved in the management of immigrants and refugees from the 1970s are described, and the 48 welfare agents that were interviewed and thus form the foundational basis for this book’s analyses are outlined. Finally, the chapter investigates the welfare state model that these welfare workers are located within. The features of the Nordic or social democratic² welfare state regime are delineated, and understanding the welfare state via its social policy is defined through ideas that may act as floating signs and oscillating meanings in interview data. This understanding, however, is also complicated by, and not entirely separated from, the signs of the nation-state and the liberal constitutional state. To single out these traits, an ethnological theory developed to understand the particular Danish case is included and added to the social policy understanding. The particular traits of the universal welfare state are laid bare and identified as, e.g., rational and universal assumptions about the human being who does not belong to a particular life mode, but to a universal order of things. Accompanying traits are also identified, such as a perpetual search for cultural lack to be remedied in order to amend the social body and its perfectibility, integration and progression, and such as the idea of a neutral social science that can detect social and cultural problems and find solutions to them, for instance through welfare work. Some of these traits grew even more visible when immigrants and refugees within the Nordic welfare model became a social policy problem in the 1990s and 2000s.

Notes

1 “Welfare work with immigrants and refugees” indicates welfare work identified by welfare workers as directed at immigrants and refugees and/or their descendants. Terms and phrases like ethnic minorities, second generation immigrants, citizens living in a ghetto, etc. may also have been used by the welfare workers. In other words, the phrase “immigrants and refugees” refers to welfare work addressing subjects who are identified and problematised as immigrants or refugees by welfare workers through their welfare work and the way it is institutionalised. This is explained further in Chapter 2 when I elaborate on how I selected the interviewees.

2 I do not write social democratic in capital letters because I do not only refer to the Social Democratic Party, but to a broader movement of social policy ideas that gained momentum across the political spectrum in Denmark and formed the basic principles of the Danish welfare state. This is explained further in Chapter 3.

Chapter 1

The stage and the centre of attention

Caroline is a nurse employed in an integration project for traumatised immigrant and refugee women. When I interviewed her in 2014, she explained the following:

Caroline: I have always thought that other cultures are appealing. I have been involved in psychiatry for so many years, and learned so many things, and diagnoses and medical treatment and so on, and now I know about the transcultural too. It has been extremely stimulating and expanding for me. I didn’t know much about the Arab world. I didn’t know that there was, say, racism … the hierarchical structure and their language culture that is partly Arabic but also their … you know the ancient Persian territory. Their understanding of illness has been new to me; when you have a back pain, you should lie down. They have not learned that you can actually get better keeping the body in motion. Many of them do not know why they have diabetes. Many Pakistanis for example have diabetes type 2, which is obesity-related. All of a sudden a huge world revealed itself to me, and I realised, oh my God, all the things we can do, because of all the things they have to deal with, or suffer from.¹

Caroline’s way of reasoning connects assumptions about immigrants and refugees, on the one hand, to assumptions about what she thinks her welfare work can do and accomplish on the other hand. When she meets and interacts with immigrants and refugees, she sees opportunities and she cuts out a new space for herself as a nurse and welfare worker in order to improve immigrants and refugees on behalf of the public interest. Like other welfare workers, Caroline told me about how she formed herself as a competent welfare worker in relation to the immigrants and refugees she wanted to help.

This book draws critical attention to welfare work addressing immigrants and refugees. It places welfare work in the margin of our societies as central to the reproduction of the state, since the state and the margin are continuously shaped in opposition to each other. Through a sociological interview-study with 48 welfare workers in the Danish welfare state, this book invites the reader to think about how welfare work’s internal dynamic is energised by reference to the immigrants’ and refugees’ alleged deficiency and to the quest to amend the immigrant and refugee in the image of the proper citizen. The book presents analyses of the symbolic boundary work and symbolic resources mobilised in welfare work, and of the sociation processes and the societal forms making and remaking society across professional identities in welfare work. The analyses draw an ambiguous, disturbing but necessary portrait of welfare work and social making and remaking in the modern era of migration and refugee arrivals in a social democratic welfare state; it is a portrait that asks critical new questions about how we see ourselves, and how we are going to proceed as a global society.

Caroline’s reasoning indicates that welfare work, in spongy, ambiguous and contradictory ways, makes symbolic boundaries of legitimate behaviour and membership of the Danish community. When promoting and including immigrants’ and refugees’ status as human beings with equal social rights to welfare services, welfare work simultaneously authorises Danish culture as a superior democratic welfare culture that should be submitted and connected to in order to enter the “welfare game”. In this process, immigrants and refugees are problematised and stereotyped as ethnic minority groups and subordinated in regards to cultural modernisation and economic performance (cf. also Brøndum 2016; Buchardt 2010; Padovan-Özdemir 2016; Øland 2017, 2019).

The interest of this book is in how the processes of othering and making different, and differentiating between ethnic groups, shape the image of what welfare work can do. Conversely, it is of interest how welfare workers’ narratives interweave different ideas about how they are able to “do good” and ­benefit immigrants and refugees, and how this “doing good” shapes their image of immigrants and refugees.

Welfare work’s magic, progress and perfectibility: dependency on the dependent

In her examination of public health care addressing indigenous people in Northern Australia, the anthropologist Tess Lea (2008:7) encircles the state’s welfare work in a most intriguing way:

Rather than treating the state as having some kind of anonymous authority […] in this work personhood is returned to technocrats in order to ask the questions: how do government officers in the helping services shape themselves in relation to those they set out to help? How do they become both agent of government and community advocate?

Lea furthermore pinpoints the ambition to perfect welfare work and the way in which this ambition nourishes welfare work’s capacity to identify needs, potentials, problems or challenges to be met or solved by welfare work. Likewise, in this book, a welfare dynamic defining how immigrants and refugees are to be prepared for welfare is in play. In Lea’s writings, the welfare dynamic is depicted as a fundamental remedial circularity which urges every welfare worker to make welfare work better, critiquing policy and previous welfare work. Every welfare worker is thus situated in a spiral of an interventionistic logic, dealing with problems that are not yet solved and upholding the idea that the problems are to be solved by welfare work.

Lea (Ibid.:13) draws critical attention to what this urge to intervene stops us from seeing:

The compulsiveness of this urge to intervene and amend in turn eclipses something so obvious it is rarely commented upon: the ‘we’ in the narrative are not planning to go away, but have a vampyric dependence on those we want to help.

The dependence is most often concealed and left in the shadow, and the welfare worker most often moves away from the spotlight which instead is given to the problems faced by the people he or she set out to help. Lea calls this phenomenon “a magic of intervention”, which stands for “an unacknowledged dependency on those we would prefer to call dependent” (Ibid.) An analysis of welfare initiatives in relation to refugee arrivals to Denmark, 1978–2016, has likewise investigated how the helping relation unfolded as ambivalent gestures of welcoming attitudes and a vampyric pursuit of friendship with the refugee (Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2017).

The dependency is part of the welfare dynamic, however, something which tends to be left out of sight so that welfare work can appear neutral and anonymous. The grounding assumption that immigrants and refugees need help from welfare workers is not normally analysed, which means “it becomes impossible to see how what is deemed ‘need’ has been constructed, or to see the human role in its construction” (Lea 2008:17). Emphasising the human role doesn’t equal an individualising or responsibilising move, which will be elaborated theoretically in Chapter 2, but it points to the idea that the images, constructions and objectifications of the Other are made and can be remade. And this is important since they become significant for the way in which welfare workers identify and attribute meaning to their welfare work with immigrants and refugees.

As a consequence, modern and rational welfare work is dependent on illusions of the Other. In this book, I will identify welfare work’s Other as an internal key dynamic of welfare work. In this endeavour, I am encouraged by education researcher Maggie MacLure and her inventive observation that what is sealed off from the modern project is internal to and a vital part of the modern project, e.g., conflict, irrationality and other phenomena not adhering to modern normativity and progressivity (MacLure 2006). This chimes well with philosopher and cultural critic Walter Benjamin’s (1999:252) pioneering critique of the concept of progress and perfectibility in the late 1930s:

Social Democratic theory,² and even more its practice, has been formed by a conception of progress which did not adhere to reality but made dogmatic claims. Progress as pictured in the minds of Social Democrats was, first of all, the progress of mankind itself (and not just advances in men’s ability and knowledge). Secondly, it was something boundless, in keeping with the infinite perfectibility of mankind. Thirdly, progress was regarded as irresistible, something that automatically pursued a straight or spiral course. Each of these predicates is controversial and open to criticism. However, when the chips are down, criticism must penetrate beyond these predicates and focus on something that they have in common. The concept of the historical progress of mankind cannot be sundered from the concept of its progression through a homogeneous, empty time. A critique of the concept of such a progression must be the basis of any criticism of the concept of progress itself.

To Benjamin, social democratic theory, which was intertwined with emerging social policies and practices on welfare and changed relations between state and citizen, promoted the progress of mankind itself. It was related to the idea of the infinite perfectibility of mankind which presented itself as irresistible and to be pursued continuously. These considerations are productive grounding thought figures to bear in mind when analysing how welfare work is activating differentiating welfare dynamics in the context of immigrants and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• PART I Introductions
• PART II Symbolic resources mobilised in welfare work addressing immigrants and refugees
• PART III Societal forms operating welfare work addressing immigrants and refugees
• Index