Paper Short Abstract:

The paper enquires into how “street-level bureaucrats” engage in the process of refugee reception in Portugal, understand citizenship rights and put them into practice based on assimilationist assumptions regarding the conditions and requisites for integration.

Paper Abstract:

The granting of refugee status and the consequent provision of international protection occurs within international and national legal frameworks. However, much of what happens in the daily lives of refugee destination contexts depends on the work of professionals (such as social workers) responsible for safeguarding the legal rights associated with granting asylum.

The aim of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to enquire into how “street-level bureaucrats” engage in the process of refugee reception in Portugal, understand citizenship rights and put them into practice. Secondly, we aim to critique the assumptions that influence their work regarding the necessary conditions and requisites for integration. To this end, we approach professionals working in this field from two perspectives: as extension officers, reproducing and implementing the state bureaucracy of the institutionalization of refugee rights; and as change agents: complementary to state services, (possible) agents of resistance, and even of state rectification, assuming responsibilities and improvising responses in situations of state dismissal. These professionals mediate between refugees and the state. As such, they do much more than deliver policies and operationalize rights: they take on a gatekeeping role, oscillating between law-on-paper and law-in-practice, between the reproduction of institutional bureaucratic regulations and the exercise of discretion. Their gatekeeping practices not only elucidate the complex and ambiguous relationship between legal status and citizenship rights, but they also shed light on how some of them are informed by assimilationist interpretations of integration.