From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls

Steve Cohen, Beth Humphries, Ed Mynott, Steve Cohen, Beth Humphries, Ed Mynott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136401848
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

This edited collection addresses theoretical, political and practical aspects of the connection between external immigration controls and internal welfare controls. It considers the implications for the both those subject to controls and those drawn into the web of implementing internal welfare controls. Topics discussed include:
* forced dispersal of asylum seekers
* local authority and voluntary sector regulations
* nationalism, racism, class and 'fairness'
* strategies for resistance to controls
* USA controls.
The book provides support to those unwittingly drawn into administering controls, showing how the role of welfare workers as immigration control enforcers is not a sudden imposition but has exisited since the introduction of controls in 1905.
From Immigration Controls to Welfare Controls will provide a valuable resource for all those professionals who come into contact with the issues surrounding immigration.

1 Introduction Locating the debate

Ed Mynott, Beth Humphries and Steve Cohen

DOI: 10.4324/9781315012681-1

This book has been written in the shadow of the Immigration and Asylum Act (1999), implemented by Britain’s Labour government. This shocking legislation built on the worst elements of UK immigration policy, introducing a voucher system in place of cash benefits, a national system of forced dispersal, and was accompanied by an increased use of detention centres.

Britain is not alone in the direction of its policy. The construction of Fortress Europe and the increase in immigration controls in the United States (and elsewhere) has subjected human beings to appalling and degrading treatment, criminalising them for crossing borders. Thousands of migrants every year are paying the ultimate price for trying to move. Such was the plight of the 3000 people who are estimated to have died in the Gibraltar strait in the five years up to 2000 (Carroll 2000; Harding 2000). Mike Davis has described the result of President Clinton’s unilateral militarisation of the border between Mexico and the United States in 1994: ‘In the NAFTA [North Atlantic Free Trade Area] era, capital, like pollution, may flow freely across the border, but labor migration faces unprecedented criminalization and repression’ (Davis 2000: 34). One recent study has estimated that nearly 1600 people had died as a result of the militarisation of the border (cited in Davis 2000: 34). This brutal reality was brought home to those of us living in Britain on 18 June 2000 as news broke that 58 Chinese people had suffocated to death in the back of a container truck in their desperate attempt to enter the UK.

However, there is more to the process of tightening controls than closing borders. Across the developed capitalist countries immigration control has increasingly come to involve the restriction of access to welfare provision on the grounds of immigration status. This collection of writings was brought together because we believed that a book was necessary which dealt with the connection between immigration control and welfare control. Any examination of this area quickly reveals that the connection has long been present. The current harmonisation across the European Union of policies to restrict asylum seekers’ access to welfare — of which Britain’s Immigration and Asylum Act is part — represents an intensification of the connection between immigration control and welfare control, not its creation.

Examining this area also throws light on a problematic characteristic of the welfare state. In particular it reveals how nationalism has justified the exclusion of certain people from access to provision. This exclusion cuts across the universalism and extension of social support more usually associated with the development of the welfare state.

This book takes sides. It aims to engage with the debates thrown up by the struggles of migrants, refugees and anti-racists. It takes a partisan position of support for those who are on the receiving end of the refined tortures of the asylum support system and those working within welfare provision who wish to resist the discrimination and racism which it entails and perpetuates.

The book also aims to straddle the barrier which often exists between academic and political debates, preferring to be an intervention into both. That requires being theoretically rigorous while also having something to say about the immediate contradictions, cruelties and dilemmas of immigration policy. The editors of this book (although not agreeing on everything) have sought to ground their criticism of current asylum regimes in an opposition to immigration controls. Indeed, while all contributors have their own perspective, it is opposition to all immigration controls, and a rejection of the utopian position that it is possible to construct fair or non-racist immigration controls, which has brought the editors together.

Our influences

There is a considerable literature on issues of immigration and racism which include discussion about British immigration controls. Some of the milestones in this literature are Foot (1965); Castles and Kosack (1973); Sivanandan (1982); Miles and Phizacklea (1984); Layton-Henry (1992) and Hayter (2000). It was during the 1980s that the link between immigration control and welfare was taken up by grass roots immigration advice and welfare advice bodies. Various publications appeared such as the No Pass Laws Here Bulletin and the influential Child Poverty Action Group pamphlet Passport To Benefits? (Gordon and Newnham 1985). The same year saw the publication of Paul Gordon’s Policing Immigration Controls which was the last book (as opposed to pamphlet or article) for some time to deal in any depth with internal immigration controls and the link with welfare. Gordon argued that internal controls should be defined as ‘any aspect of law or administration related in any way to immigration status which operates within the UK’ (Gordon 1985: 2). His discussion included the more obvious aspects of control, the measures to trace and apprehend those who may be in breach of immigration laws. But it also covered the ‘relationship between immigration law and other areas such as employment, housing and the welfare state’. Gordon made clear the result of making access to work and welfare dependent on immigration status: ‘the overall effect is the questioning, restricting and controlling of rights, not just of those who are immigrants, but those who are commonly assumed to be, because they are black’ (Gordon 1985: 2).

Work such as Gordon’s popularised the understanding that internal immigration controls are likely to cast suspicion on all black people regardless of their immigration status. Organisations like the Committee for Non-Racist Benefits took up the question of racial discrimination in social security, and extensive research highlighted the reality of such discrimination. However, whilst this important effect was identified (the effect of racism), less attention has been paid to the continually developing system of internal controls which create and recreate this linkage, in the asylum and immigration legislation of the 1990s. It is only very recently that the connection between immigration control and welfare has begun to be analysed again in any depth, albeit from rather different perspectives (Bommes and Geddes 2000; Geddes 2000; Cohen 2001).

The removal of certain categories of asylum seeker from access to the welfare system was central to the asylum legislation of the 1990s. While this has been the subject of journalistic and political comment, and dealt with in reports mainly by the voluntary sector, it has not been the subject of sustained academic work — with the exception of the journal Race and Class (see especially Fekete 1998). Labour’s Immigration and Asylum Act represents a leap forward in the removal of access to welfare. What has often gone unnoticed is that it is not simply asylum seekers but every person ‘subject to immigration control’ who has been removed from legal entitlement to a vast swathe of welfare provision. It is the huge amounts of benefits and services now dependent on immigration status for eligibility (and the new poor law created for asylum seekers) that represents such a significant and recent extension of internal controls as they relate to welfare provision.

There is already a literature which deals with the reception and settlement of refugees. In Britain, the Home Office has produced several research papers (Jones 1982; Carey-Wood et al. 1995; Duke and Marshall 1995; Field 1985). There are various books and articles about the experience of Vietnamese refugees in Britain (Joly 1988; Bell and Clinton 1992). Joly (1996) has written about reception and settlement policies, comparing the experiences of Chilean and Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s and 1980s in Britain and France, and specifically on local authority policy on refugees in Britain. Joly and Cohen (1989) bring together contributions covering many European countries and have as one of their major themes, ‘the role of the state in the admission of refugees and its role, together with local authorities, in their settlement’ (Joly and Cohen 1989: 9). Similar themes are amongst those addressed by Kushner and Knox (1999) in their definitive account of the refugee experience in the twentieth century.

This literature certainly reveals how problematic have been attempts by the state to include and ‘integrate’ those on whom it has bestowed the right to remain in Britain. However, the perspective of our book is not that of refugee reception and settlement as such — although that cannot fail to be deeply affected by a restrictive asylum policy, whatever the attempts by government to segregate the two issues (Home Office 2000).

The perspective of this book is the treatment of those who are subject to immigration control and the creation of regimes which deliberately categorise them as less deserving of social support than other people. Our intention has been to develop the theme of how governments have extended internal controls, particularly with reference to welfare provision. We have also highlighted the ways in which those who work within the welfare system are increasingly being drawn into systems of immigration control. We aim to encourage welfare workers and professionals to question these developments, and ask whether there is any prospect of resistance to these developments and what strategies might be used.

The structure of the book

The book is divided into three parts. Part I deals with political, historical and international issues. Part II deals with the contemporary issues in immigration and welfare. Part III goes from theory to resistance.

In Chapter 2 (which begins Part I) Ed Mynott uses a Marxist framework to look at how a racialised nationalism has been a constant driving force in the construction of immigration controls under capitalism. He also contrasts the immigration control/welfare link in the period of the welfare state’s construction with today’s period of its neoliberal restructuring. He concludes with a call for the ‘creative fusion’ of the established anti-racist and the new anti-capitalist movements.

In Chapter 3, Debra Hayes examines the history of the relationship between immigration controls and access to welfare in a British context. She traces its origins to the 1905 Aliens Act and the debates which preceded it. She explores how the theme of controlling access to welfare by immigration status developed throughout the twentieth century, with modern day asylum seekers becoming the equivalent of their ‘alien’ forebears.

In Chapter 4, Shirley Joshi tackles the class nature of British immigration controls from the Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 to the present day. She notes the similarities between the racist underclass theories — prevalent in the United States — which stress welfare dependency — and the similar allegations which have regularly informed British immigration legislation. She concludes that Britain’s current immigration policy is still underpinned by a discourse on the underclass as well as a moral panic about migrants.

In Chapter 5, Wendy Zimmermann and Michael Fix look at immigration and welfare reforms in the United States through the lens of mixed-status families. This provides a welcome opportunity to look at a relatively unexplored area, but one which could become important in British as well as United States immigration law. For example, there already exists in UK law the situation where one parent may be able to claim child benefit, but the other parent may not have the appropriate immigration status. Quite complex welfare or immigration problems in this respect can also arise in respect to Working Families Tax Credit and Council Tax or Housing Benefit. The question of mixed-immigration-status families is, as outlined in this chapter, significant in the USA because of children having US citizenship while their parents do not. By contrast, since 1983 birth in the UK has not led automatically to British citizenship. However, difference in immigration status between parents may be the next stage in the curtailing of benefit eligibility, with the state insisting both have the same appropriate status.

Part II, contemporary issues in immigration and welfare, begins with Chapter 6, in which Adele Jones examines how the pursuit of immigration controls impacts on family life. Wh...