Disciplining Poverty: “Migrant” Workers in the Maze of German Welfare Bureaucracy
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14422/mig.23752.021Keywords:
migrant workers, welfare state, Germany, bureaucratic violence, deservingness, racializationAbstract
This article examines migrant workers’ experiences with the German welfare state, drawing on three empirical studies conducted in Berlin (2014-2021) with rejected third-country asylum seekers and Southern and Eastern European Union citizens. It highlights how state bureaucracies implement selective access to welfare through everyday practices conceptualised as “bureaucratic violence” (Graeber, 2012), which are the product of interaction between legislative frameworks, their implementation by frontline officials, and legitimising discourses.
Despite migrants’ diverse legal statuses, common patterns in their interactions with the public administration are identified through four analytical dimensions—“administrative temporality,” “discretionary micro-power,” “moral economy of deservingness,” and “linguistic and racialised bordering practices”—which are traced comparatively across three distinct migrant groups within the same national welfare system.
The analysis reveals how bureaucratic practices shape power relations between local authorities and migrants, producing structural disadvantages and transnational vulnerabilities. Institutions such as the Jobcenter and the Foreigners’ Office (Ausländerbehörde) are understood as key sites where neoliberal border and welfare regimes filter access to rights and social participation.
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