The Social Worker as Border Guard: How and Why British Welfare Workers Are Disposed to Control Immigration

Abstract

This article looks at the public provision of social assistance to migrant families residing irregularly in London. It traces and explains the reconstitution of social workers’ professional identities and institutionalized practices that made them part of the ‘hostile environment’ the British government has been creating for irregular migrants. Drawing mostly on in-depth interviews with local welfare bureaucrats, social workers, and NGO practitioners, we identify three governmental moves that played a crucial role in turning social workers into border guards: the shifting of financial burden to local authorities; the linking of migrants’ destitution with their irregularity; and the framing of their expulsion as ‘voluntary return’. We employ a theoretical approach that builds on Foucault's differentiation between three principal modalities of power—law/sovereignty, discipline, and security—and highlights the productive interplay between them. Our analysis shows how the logics of law, discipline, and security complement and reinforce each other within policy, discourse, and everyday practice, and how this contributes to resolving inherent contradictions that otherwise hamper social workers’ participation in immigration control. The findings help to explain the often surprisingly smooth internalization of immigration control into public welfare institutions and to better understand the organizational modalities of everyday bordering within liberal-democratic states.