Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the ways in which welfare services play a role as internal mechanisms for immigration control in Norway through state efforts to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate receivers of welfare state benefits.

Paper long abstract:

In public discourses, irregular migration is often described as constituting a threat to state sovereignty, and has in Europe been accompanied by progressively more restrictive admission policies. The actual presence of irregular migrants within these nation-states however, reveals the limits of border policing strategies, and presents the different states with a fundamental dilemma concerning questions of social rights, cohesion and solidarity that supposedly underpin European welfare states and the exclusion and marginalization of territorial present individuals.

While it can be argued that globalization and increased transnational movement somehow has diluted the concept of national citizenship by according rights on the ground of "territorial hereness" ("denizenship"), irregular migrants remain largely outside the framework of rights. The precise boundary of exclusion can however be seen to be tested and negotiated through shifting laws and policies, institutional practises and different conceptualizations of irregular migrants in public discourses that both promote and are influenced by broader organizational and conceptual changes in the welfare state.

Through the case of irregular migration in Norway this paper explores the ways in which welfare services come to play a role as internal mechanisms for immigration control and deterrence through state efforts to distinguish more tightly between legitimate and illegitimate receivers of welfare state benefits. The debates surrounding the elaboration of a new health regulation regarding irregular migrants implemented in June 2011 will serve as a point of reference. How notions such as vulnerability, responsibility, moral and agency are framed and contested will be central themes.