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Abstract

This paper is devoted to exploring problems of access to healthcare for refugees in Finland. Refugees encounter structural, infrastructural, and bureaucratic barriers that are further intensified by welfare nationalism and neoliberal logics framing welfare as a limited resource distributed among locals and the newcomers through zero-sum dynamics. In our research, we consider how morally based solidarities among refugees, healthcare workers and mediators impact access of refugees to healthcare in line with established rules or in contradiction to them.

Drawing on qualitative data from semi-structured interviews conducted in Finland (2023–2025) with Ukrainian refugees suffering from chronic illnesses, healthcare professionals, and a wide range of mediators (including volunteers, translators, and local residents), the research explores how access to healthcare is achieved in practice. We argue that refugees' search for access to healthcare occurs with the participation and assistance of other actors. Solidarities arise among the actors through the convergence of their moral positions and prove to be a vital resource for ensuring access to medical care.

Such convergence is grounded in several key moral foundations, including (1) humanitarian values emphasizing the primacy of life and suffering (individual level), (2) critiques of institutional inadequacies framed in terms of justice, deservingness, and inclusion (institutional level), and (3) the moral legitimation of the refugees’ claims to welfare resources (structural level). These interactions generate what we conceptualize as a “moral infrastructure” of healthcare access, which operates through informal practices such as out-of-hours care, financial assistance, translation support, and formal assistance in bureaucratic navigation.

The analysis contributes to subject-centered approaches in migration studies and social policy research by foregrounding refugees as active agents whose moral frameworks shape their interactions with welfare institutions and other actors. It also advances the sociology of morality by demonstrating how moral evaluations function both as a basis for solidarity and as a site of contestation within welfare regimes. We argue that morality does not merely complement legal regulation but actively reconfigures it, enabling access where formal rules are lacking, inactive, or restrict access. In doing so, the research challenges neoliberal assumptions about welfare as “a limited good”, showing instead how morally grounded solidarities expand the practical boundaries of welfare provision.