Crime Prevention, Migration Control and Surveillance Practices

Welfare Bureaucracy as Mobility Deterrent

Veronika Nagy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351181389
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

EU expansion has stoked fears that criminals from the East may abuse freedom of movement to exploit the benefit systems of richer states. This book examines the way in which physical state borders are increasingly being replaced by internal border controls in the form of state bureaucracies as a means of regulating westward migration. The work examines the postmodern effect of globalisation and how ontological anxieties contribute to securitisation and social sorting in Western countries. It discusses the changes in control societies and how targeted surveillance as a geopolitical tool leads to new digitalised mechanisms of population selection. The book presents a casestudy of Roma migrants in the UK to examine the coping strategies adopted by those targeted. The book also critically evaluates the limitations of digitalised bureaucratic systems and the dangers of reliance on virtual data and selection methods.

1 Introduction

Technological advances and data collection practices are hot topics in the daily news, as are discussions about the risks of digitalisation, self-learning algorithms and the marketisation of private information. Several studies have raised concerns about privacy, the threats posed by social media use and the consequences of the information society for local bureaucratic practices (Borja & Castells, 2013). New disciplines like digital humanities, internet governance, digital criminology, or studies on big data attempt to frame the social impacts of these technical advantages and their use in legal, social and economic spheres.

Digitisation has affected individuals since the era of machine-readable data began (Kistermann, 1991). Electronic data processing followed the emergence of electronic computing on both sides of the Atlantic around 1940. Within a decade, governments recognised that digitisation offered them an opportunity to create “national data systems” to consolidate data about people for use in governance tools and sociological research (e.g. the Metropolit projects in Sweden and Denmark; Osler et al., 2006). Digitisation created possibilities for faster, interrelated data processing at all governance levels, but it also led to the contemporary shift in the patterns of organisational behaviour, in which digitalised control practices like surveillance create unequal social structures (Taylor, 2017). This institutional digitalisation and the role of corporate actors in public services created a new academic discourse about digital inequality, such as the unequal distribution of risks and resources associated with online welfare practices.

Previous surveillance studies have generally stressed the risks and possible social implications of governmental data collection as it relates to privacy protection (Lyon, 2013). With the extension of digitalised service provisions, new surveillance practices are introduced by local authorities that increasing effect the life of newcomers. There has been unfortunately limited attention paid to the responses of those people who are subjected to such algorithmic control measures (Hannah-Moffat, 2018). Although qualitative studies are increasingly describing surveillance subjects’ counteractions (McCahill & Finn, 2014), there has been limited research on the asymmetries of digital surveillance. Governments overestimate the objectivity and effectiveness of digital bureaucracies, in particular the relaibilty of surveillance practices. Moreover, the cumulative effects of surveillance awareness are underestimated in the field of welfare provisions, especially in the case of EU migrants.

This book aims to critically reflect on the relative efficiency of digital bureaucracies and the extent to which it might impact the everyday lives of groups subjected to financial risk profiling. Current securitisation of EU migrants increased the role of surveillance techniques in state bureaucracies of many old EU Member States and allows them to select and expose targeted groups, such as the Roma. This study explores the growing awareness of monitoring practices, how this leads to social distrust, increases fear and anxiety, and turns surveillance cities into ghost societies. By reflecting on social sorting mechanisms in the UK welfare system, I will explain how digitalised surveillance experiences of ethnic migrants lead to the amplification of self-censorship mechanisms, creating a sphere of confusion in the bureaucratic system that results in a spiral of securitisation and intensified surveillance practices.

By linking crime such as benefit fraud to intra-European mobility, political debates increased security concerns and scepticism about newcomers from Central Eastern Europe (CEE), in particular Roma (for a detailed explanation, see Duwell & Wollmer, 2009; O’Reilly, 2007a; Ringold, 2000). Governments have used these security concerns to justify new restrictive measures ‘for profiling the bad foreign opportunist versus the good citizen who deserves state support and protection’ (Erjavec, 2001, p. 670). Although the securitisation of Roma migrants is not a new phenomenon, the methods of targeting and selecting undesired citizens have been refined.

Recent convergences of once discrete control measures of newcomers have resulted in unexpected outcomes in governance practices. Data resources like social media are facilitating new surveillance practices that are used to classify, predict and prevent individual behaviour considered as social or economic risk. In this panoptic virtual society, governmental and business activities are intertwined in bureaucratic technologies, and population control is shifting from traditional policing methods to internal financial monitoring of suspected migrants.

This book presents the financial modalities of migration control and explains how welfare authorities screen and trace unattractive migrant groups that are associated with economic threat. Much of this book focuses on analysing the tactics used by securitised individuals, especially how they use identity management to challenge social sorting mechanisms in their interactions with social service organisations. This study provides an extended overview of coping strategies invented by one targeted population: Central European Roma. As an interdisciplinary, multi-sited research of welfare surveillance, this study addresses geopolitical incentives in the EU and how Roma migrants use calculated coping strategies to prevent exclusion from social services. The central question is: How does the interplay between digitalised bureaucracies of welfare providers of this book and the coping strategies of EU newcomers shape the social sorting of migrants in the United Kingdom?

1.1 Roma mobility in the EU

Based on the fifth EU Treaty, the coordination of social security systems (which was also revamped in 2004) was made more generous for people who move around the EU. This revision tightened the rules on non-discrimination and strengthened the right to use aggregate contributions made in different member states to calculate entitlements, including the right to export benefits to one’s country of residence. After the last EU enlargement, like many other CEE families, Roma ethnic minorities have been trying to use their European citizenship to find better lives in Western Europe. However, the majority of Roma finds themselves excluded and marginalised by new administrative rules in their host countries justified by new welfare principles. Interestingly, the cause of the ‘Roma flood’ in the political discourse is frequently linked to the ‘promising’ welfare services of host countries, which has led local authorities to increase control strategies and limit access to social benefits claimed by CEE newcomers. The key argument for welfare restrictions is framed in a neoliberal approach to eligibility based on labour market participation. According to the underlying assumptions, these migrants are responsible for their marginal position and can consequently be legitimately excluded from any entitlement to governmental support (Goddard, 2012).

Shortly, many member states have questioned why they have to export ‘their’ social benefits to EU citizens who have acquired welfare rights in their state, in particular those migrants who are defined in terms of a security threat. Accordingly, neoliberal state recognition has been based on legal economic activity and social citizenship of newcomers rather than legal EU citizenship. This neoliberal principle also challenged the European integration framework, raising vigorous contestation about the meaning and extension of ‘social rights’of EU citizens, how much they should be contingent on people’s productive behaviour and who should be covered by the state. This contribution is measured in finalncial terms such as documented work and tax payment in the country of residence. Shortly, within the contemporary hierarchies of work, the functioning of borders has less to do with the geopolitical delineation of sovereign prerogatives (i.e. the power to exclude non-citizens from access to a state’s territory) and more to do with the attempt to control, select and govern specific productive categories of people at a distance (De Giorgi, 2012). A key element of this selection is that citizenship is presented and wrapped up as a form of contract between the state and the responsible citizen who accepts the preconditions. Using the technique of a contract is often recognised as part of a neoliberal strategy, all the more in cases where the state also involves the (local) community or private parties in terms of sharing the responsibility for this process (Rose, 1999; Yeatman, 1998).

Recently, responsibilisation has been a key principle of this dominant neoliberal welfare approach to Western European surveillance incentives (Goddard, 2012). Therefore, it aims to identify particular groups who are seen as unwilling to integrate and participate in their societies. This participation is generally defined as labour market participation and is measured by the level of dependency on state funding, such as social benefits. To combat the perceived economic threat to national welfare, new security measures are intended to differentiate the good or productive citizens from the undesired, ‘passive’ citizens. As a result, social and spatial exclusion is based on financial determinants that serve as a functional realm that precludes inclusion of the unproductive others (Halfmann, 1998). Before we can explore how these welfare-service-based financial monitoring structures facilitate spatial population control, we need to understand how governing bodies in the EU are able to invent incentives that pressure undesired groups to voluntarily leave their territory.

Roma who are EU citizens cannot be ignored or sanctioned based on their migration status, but they might be dependent on government aid that enables them to settle down in a host country. When they are subjected to constant financial monitoring and benefit cuts, they can be forced to leave by restricting their entitlement to local welfare support. Therefore, the idea that certain countries are ‘welfare magnets’ has resulted in new monitoring-based restrictions and the securitisation of benefit claimants by social service providers, which is intended to enforce the mobility of unwanted migrants.

1.2 Social sorting as modality of governance power

By revealing social surveillance and selection mechanisms based on financial surveillance, I will show how crime politics infiltrates legislative areas (e.g. welfare provisions) by encouraging the use of new governance technologies in digitalised bureaucracies. This book provides empirical data on the mechanisms of surveillance strategies that promote efficiency and objectivity while justifying privatised practices of control and sanctions outside the field of crime control. Empirical data is used to describe the effects of businesslike values on welfare provisions and to identify the risk profiles of screening instruments used as social sorting tools. I will also examine how service-dependent migrants adapt their coping strategies to these constantly changing selection methods.

Virtual control measures not only reflect the values and categories of the host society but also how individual parameters are translated into risk categories. Welfare application systems, amongst others, use the narratives of political and academic stakeholders to shape these parameters by linking ethnic connotations to economic power. Although institutional discrimination is often described in terms of ethnicity and race, this book presents how EU migrants are subject to discrimination based on financial parameters instead of ethnic stigma. To better understand these selective surveillance mechanisms, I examine several actors (including professionals and activists) who might contribute to these mechanisms by linking poverty to ethnicity and thus shifting discriminatory notions based on visible parameters (e.g. skin colour, culture) towards less visible selection methods (e.g. credit checks).

Unlike studies that define transnational mobility in terms of migration categories, this analysis reveals the dynamics and constantly shifting nature of population flows. I explore how newcomers, stigmatised by financial inefficacy as an ethnic construct, adapt to rapidly changing circumstances by inventing coping strategies to circumvent the bureaucratic labyrinth of host societies. I challenge the underlying assumptions behind efficiency-oriented governance technologies and use selected empirical data to critically analyse the limitations of surveillance and control practices, and their implications for institutional distrust. The dynamic relationship between central European migrants and bureaucratic service providers in London provides an example of how neoliberal market values adapted in social provisions lead to discriminatory welfare services.

As it will be illustrated, social sorting and population control practices are shaped by the intersubjective construction of security (Burke, 2007). This securitisation ‘enables, produces and constrains individuals within larger systems of power and institutional action’ (Burke, 2007, p. 20) defined under different modalities of surveillance (Bigo & Walker, 2007; Jones & Newburn, 1998). Based on the Foucauldian concept of disciplinary power (1977), this panoptic modality in governing initiatives includes simultaneous control and behaviour-modifying mechanisms. As the following collected empirical data illustrates, enforcing mobility by financial restrictions is one of the most common goals deployed by authorities to channel and regulate their populations and control unwieldy flows of people. As Hyndman (2012) explains:

The idea of migrants as a vector of insecurity prevailed, creating potent fear that could be used for draconian measures. The biometric management of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ with its assemblage of new laws, policies and control practices render geopolitics and biopolitics inseparable.

(p. 245)

State incentives are coded in different panoptic modalities to guide people on the move. These include mapping, valuation, codification, enclosures and boundaries. Since these incentives are proactively trying to channel individual conduct, financial planning is one of the key means of managing (im)mobilities and access. This apparatus of control and surveillance, used as spatial disciplinary technology in the EU, might be even more central in the de- and re-territorialisation of people, since no visa regulations are in force for European citizens (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). As a neoliberal incentive, border control is thus drawn out by the gaze of social economic surveillance.

Accordingly, social security and immigration policies are increasingly intertwined within the surveillance practices of member states, blurring the line between welfare and crime control measures. They introduce new geopolitical measures and local risk management strategies for tracing and screening mobile groups, such as Roma migrants. These monitoring practices, such as data analysis software, are taking new forms in technocratic bureaucracies and changing the means of interaction between newcomers and administrative bodies in host societies.

In order to understand how these welfare-service-based financial monitoring structures facilitate spatial population control, we need to understand how governing bodies are able to invent incentives that try to make undesired groups voluntarily leave their executive territory. This study uses a multi-sited ethnography to explore these asymmetries of surveillance within the virtual walls of Fortress Europe. In particular, this book uncovers coping strategies used by targeted populations and investigates how they reshape existing profiling strategies.

By following the critical surveillance paradigm, this study aims to analyse the growing challenge of expending digitalised bureaucracies as internal borders of EU member states by introducing the concept of a ‘Welfare Ban-Opticon’. This refers to Bigo’s social sorting mechanism (2008b) through digitalised social provisions.

By illustrating the dynamics of intra-European mobility control and the social construction of threat associated with foreign EU ethnic minorities, this study critically reflects on the use of digitalised surveillance methods and draws attention to the shifting parameters of bureaucratic selection measures, in particular those related to the financial capabilities of newcomers. By following the dialectic relationship between welfare providers and migrants, I reveal the dynamics of criminal and migration policies that are defined in terms of social and financial threat. These dynamics have also led to the expansion of selective control measures in other bureaucratic fields, such as social welfare.

The selected cases of Roma migrants are not presented to evaluate the label of ‘benefit cheats’ or to assess the extent to which Roma are involved in benefit fraud. Instead, they are used to illustrate the dynamics of targeted policing through digitalised bureaucratic welfare provisions, and to describe how financial parameters have become the new incentives of migration selection.

The methodology underpinning this study was intended to generate data about 1) how criminal politics and security measures are changing the role of welfare services; 2) how stakeholders such as academics and NGOs are framing migration management principles and 3) how Roma migrants labelled as ‘benefit tourists’ experience and anticipate interactions with social services in the UK. I collected data through observation and participation in private conversations, and through activities with civil servants, interpreters and advocacy workers. I then analysed many of these interactions through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with migrants, advocacy workers and civil servants.

1.3 The relevance of welfare surveillance studies

Although current changes in policymaking are targeting ‘benefit shoppers’, there is limited scholarly literature that explores the role of welfare policies in migration control within the EU. In the United Kingdom, social policies have been rapidly changing since 2006, causing confusion for service providers about entitlement changes and control measures. With increasing digitalisation and managerialist values in social service provision, the discretionary power of civil servants has decreased, raising concerns about efficiency-oriented normative approaches. By adapting surveillance techniques like profiling algorithms from corporate software producers, the UK government deemed the professionalism of civil servants to be unnecessary. Although these measures were invented to support the efficiency of service providers, according to recent conditions, they are only expected to decrease welfare costs based on annual targets (Harlow, 2003). The social and professional impacts of such changes in policy adaptations can only be evaluated by qualitative research methods. Therefore, I will assess practical implications and, especially, the extent to which professionals and service providers ignore restrictive policies.

The key objective of this study is to explore the shift in the purpose of welfare legislation concerning profiling practices, especially how restrictive social policy is used for migration control of newcomers in London. Contradictory objectives regarding intra-European migration and welfare restrictions between EU policy and local welfare measures are explored. In short, this book highlights how selective social policies trigger welfare claimants to modify their behaviour according to restricted welfare incentives.

Critical geopolitical studies are increasingly focusing on the relationship between space and identity in the context of the EU (Tuathail & Dalby, 1998). Most of them conceptualise biopolitical dev...