Rachel Humphris

Reciprocity for new migrant integration: resource conservation, investment and exchange

ABSTRACT In this paper we bring a new perspective to the understanding of migrant integration. We focus on how new migrants use reciprocity to make and sustain connections. In turn, we identify integration resources accessed through those connections and associated acts of reciprocal exchange. Using qualitative data collected in retrospective interviews from a maximum variation sample of new migrants arriving in the U.K. up to two years before interview, we identify five interconnected sub-types of reciprocity and explore how these are used to replace or substitute resources lost through the act of migration. We argue that, contrary to Hobfoll’s [2011, “Conservation of Resource Caravans and Engaged Settings.” Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology 84: 116–122. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8325.2010.02016.x] ideas about conservation of resources in crisis, migrants use resource exchange strategies to develop social networks which may form important buffers against migratory stress and aid access to functional, psychological and affective resources that can further integration. The paper concludes by highlighting the significance of reciprocity in moving the theorisation of integration in new a new direction.

Borders of home: Roma migrant mothers negotiating boundaries in home encounters

ABSTRACT The borders of Europe do not only operate at territorial limits. This article argues for those identified as Roma, UK immigration control has shifted from gate-keeping at the territorial border to gate-keeping access to services through child welfare. Three factors have interrelated to foreground boundary-making in home encounters: European Union expansion, development of a post-welfare state and governmentalisation of vulnerable children. First this article examines how these three processes converge to activate the border through assessments of mothering in the home. Due to mothers’ particular migrant status, they are confronted with a choice between loss of motherhood or movement from the national territory. Second it illustrates how mothers engage in strategies of self-representation to negotiate bordering processes, requiring intensive work with a variety of actors. These actors are themselves located within racialised and gendered hierarchies. This article illustrates through ethnographic vignettes how the home is recast as a site of negotiating access to state forms where judgements of ‘good motherhood’ produce bordering effects. This represents a governing logic applied both to mothers and frontline workers resulting in stratified reproduction based on hierarchies of values.

On the threshold:: becoming Romanian Roma, everyday racism and residency rights in transition

ABSTRACT This article examines the reaction of welfare state actors and ‘Romanian Roma’ migrants to the political environment on migration in the UK. Based on the ethnographic fieldwork between January 2013 and March 2014, the article focuses on how processes of everyday racism infused understandings of the legal framework for European migrants’ residency rights. The article first explores how state actors developed ideas about ‘Romanian Roma families’ as opposed to ‘Romanian-not-Roma families’ in a context marked by pervasive uncertainty about legal entitlements, welfare restructuring and decreasing resources. Second, I draw on new migrants’ accounts to identify their perceptions and understandings of discrimination placed within their previous experiences of racism and state violence. The article argues that processes of racialisation are subtly enfolded into everyday life shaping the narratives through which both welfare state actors and new migrants understand their situated experiences and future plans. The article reveals the small and mundane practices that reproduce racialised hierarchies which maintain the notion of ‘Roma’ as a group with particular proclivities and the affects for their socio-legal status as European migrants in the UK.

Who Counts in Crises? The New Geopolitics of International Migration and Refugee Governance

ABSTRACT Recent migration ‘crises’ raise important geopolitical questions. Who is ‘the migrant’ that contemporary politics are fixated on? How are answers to ‘who counts as a migrant’ changing? Who gets to do that counting, and under what circumstances? This forum responds to, as well as questions, the current saliency of migration by examining how categories of migration hold geopolitical significance—not only in how they are constructed and by whom, but also in how they are challenged and subverted. Furthermore, by examining how the very concepts of ‘migrant’ and ‘refugee’ are used in different contexts, and for a variety of purposes, it opens up critical questions about mobility, citizenship and the nation state. Collectively, these contributions aim to demonstrate how problematising migration and its categorisation can be a tool of enquiry into other phenomena and processes.

Outsourcing the ‘best interests’ of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in the era of austerity

ABSTRACT This article examines the governance of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children (UASC) and former UASC in the U.K. and reveals the expanding reach of asylum privatisation to unaccompanied children. In the process, the principle of the ‘best interests of the child’ enshrined in international and national law is being reconfigured through practices of service outsourcing and out-of-county placement that are used to distance local authorities from their statutory responsibilities. Drawing on a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative data on the distribution and circumstances of UASC and in-depth qualitative interviews with service providers, we identify three intertwining processes that contribute to redefining ‘best interests’: first, the increasing distance in goals and priorities of managers and frontline workers is exacerbated by the emergence of new actors operating within the for-profit sector; second, decisions based on budget saving goals lead to young people being moved around the country and undermining their capacity to access support; third, restructuring and mainstreaming services for UASC misplace the expertise needed in this complex area. As a result of these processes, spaces for resisting such changes are increasingly restricted and ‘best interests’ are reshaped in ways which frontline workers think may be detrimental to the well-being of children and young people.

Mutating faces of the state? Austerity, migration and faith-based volunteers in a UK downscaled urban context

This article explores how austerity combined with the UK Government’s expressed aim of creating a hostile environment, reshaped policy and practice towards new migrants in a downscaled urban area. There is an assumption that volunteers come to govern in zones the state has ceded or abandoned. However, how volunteers come to undertake these roles, their discretionary power and the consequences for state theory have not been fully explored. Drawing on 73 interviews with local state actors and volunteers and in-depth participant observation over 14 months with more than 200 new migrants, this article argues volunteers become the ‘face of the state’ for new migrants with direct effects. Volunteers have wide discretionary power and negotiate uncertainty by falling back on religious values and local narratives of migration forging new practices of governance. This article makes two contributions to theorising the state. First, the economic position of a city and narratives of place shapes who gains legal status and state membership, adding to literature on the relationship between civil society and the state in neoliberal contexts. Second, seemingly mundane actions and intimate relations have immediate implications for political membership. This represents a system of governance that relies on assessments of behaviours in new migrants’ everyday lives rather than rights or entitlements. This article unpacks these assessments and explores the consequences for volunteers and new migrants alike.

Universalism, diversity and norms: gratitude, healthcare and welfare chauvinism

ABSTRACT Access to universal healthcare is a normative expectation of citizens in European welfare states. As part of a comparative study of healthcare in diverse European neighbourhoods, we met women who described failures of the public healthcare system, together with gratitude for that system. Challenges to European welfare states of ageing populations, the retraction of resources available for healthcare, and globalised migration streams have been linked to xenophobic ‘welfarist’ attempts to restrict access to services for new arrivals and those seen as failing to contribute sufficiently. Stories of healthcare systems’ failure to treat symptoms, pain, and suffering in a timely and caring fashion came from eight women of non-European migrant backgrounds as part of a wider interview study in four European cities (Birmingham, Uppsala, Lisbon, Bremen). These accounts suggest that a normative aspect of welfare provision has been reproduced – that is, the expression of gratitude – despite inadequate services. Where welfarist attitudes to migration meet normative aspects of healthcare, suffering may be compounded by an expectation of gratitude. The regrettable unmet healthcare need of the eight women whose cases are presented suggests that other marginalised healthcare users may also be under-served in apparently universal healthcare systems.