Welfare deservingness for migrants: Does the Welfare State model matter?

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Cogitatio. This is an open access article available under a Creative Commons licence. The published version can be accessed at the following link on the publisher’s website: https://doi.org/10.17645/si.v10i1.4818This article draws on the idea that welfare systems and institutions are based on normative assumptions about justice, solidarity, and responsibility. Even though the literature on welfare deservingness has highlighted the connection between ideas of solidarity and the support to, for instance, people with different ethnic backgrounds, there is very little research on the interconnections of different welfare state models and ideas on how migration should be governed. This article suggests that there is a link between the welfare state models suggested by Esping‐Anderssen and different discourses on migrant welfare deservingness. The article explores the interlinkages of three welfare state models—liberal, socialdemocratic, and continental‐corporative—and four discourses on welfare deservingness of migrants in respect to social welfare—labourist, ethno‐cultural, residential, and welfarist (see Carmel & Sojka, 2020). It is suggested that the normative foundations embedded in different welfare systems lead to dissimilar ways of approaching migrants and migration.Research for this article is based on and was funded by the NORFACE Welfare State Futures programme (grant number 462–74‐731). The research was developed in the TRANSWEL project Mobile Welfare in a Transnational Europe led by Prof. Anna Amelina. The interviews were collected during Work Package 1, led by Dr. Emma Carmel, and Work Package 3, led by Prof. Ann Runfors. We are grateful to all policy experts who participated in our research, for their time and consideration in sharing their views and experiences with us.Published onlin

The Political as the Personal : Postmemory among Descendants of Polish Migrants in Sweden

This article analyses interviews with descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden using the lens of postmemory. The aim is to show how they narrated growing up with parents and grandparents who recalled traumatic experiences of the occupation of Poland during World War II and of the communist era, and to explore the transgenerational imprints of this recall. A number of less-explored aspects of postmemory are elucidated: postmemory related to less extreme abuse and violence than that experienced by Holocaust survivors; postmemory in both second and third generation; postmemory as narrated by those who grew up in a different country to that in which the trauma of their relatives is rooted; and the lived after-effects of trauma

Navigating the Radar : Descendants of Polish Migrants and Racialized Social Landscapes in Sweden

The article takes interest in the under-researched category of descendants of migrants in Sweden and their specific experiences of racialization. While studies have shown that descendants of migrants from non-European countries tend to be racialized as non-white and non-Swedish in Sweden, descendants of European migrants are less explored. Nevertheless, they are sometimes assumed to be unproblematically integrated into Swedish whiteness. Drawing on in-depth interviews, this article contributes with an empirically based analysis of how the so far almost non-researched case of descendants of Polish migrants in Sweden navigate the racialized social landscape in Sweden. Inspired by critical race- and whiteness studies, the article shows that skin colour, phenotypes, speech and body schemes intersect in the racialization of the descendants. While the descendants often were in possession of materialized Swedish whiteness and also seemed able to perform embodied Swedish whiteness, they nevertheless sometimes became visible and their full inclusion into Swedish whiteness became questioned.

Policy Experts Negotiating Popular Fantasies of 'Benefit Tourism' Policy Discourses on Deservingness and Their Relation to Welfare Chauvinism

Welfare provision as a border control strategy is often discussed in relation to irregular migrants and refugees. However, this article focuses on EU migrants. Using discourse theory, it explores interviews with policy experts from four migrant-receiving EU countries. The aim is to identify policy discourses on deservingness articulated in relation to intra-EU migrants from four member states in Eastern Europe, to detect mechanisms that generate these discourses and to reveal how they relate to welfare chauvinism. The article uncovers contesting logics that move policy experts toward welfare-chauvinist assumptions, which might contribute to the discursive welfare exclusion of EU migrants.This work was supported by NORFACE under grant number 462-74-t32</p