The neoliberal welfare state and its discontents. Slow violence against irregular migrants in Norway

ABSTRACT

Welfare rights in Norway, as in other European nation-states, are increasingly used as techniques of control and management of irregular migration. Proliferation of borders is generated by dispersal of welfare rights, establishing structural differentiations. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants in Norway, we argue that the neoliberal welfare state produces precarious subject positions in three mundane ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including what we call digital borders. Exploring the bordering structures of the welfare state we analyse the complex relation between technologies of government and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we understand this relation as slow violence. This slow violence operates and is legitimized through the legal, policy and neoliberal welfare structures of the state. We show that the welfare state’s implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state’s principles of universalism and egalitarianism. Simultaneously, the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state dwindle egalitarianism as a principle and value.

KEYWORDS:

• Slow violence
• temporality
• digital borders
• irregular migrants
• precarity

1. Introduction

Mani, a 22-year-old Palestinian man is speaking about the time when he went to the police station to apply for asylum in Norway. He recalls that day, which took place two years ago, very well; I went there and she [a policewoman] asked me again ‘where do you come from?’ She was typing it on a computer, so she had a record of everything you were saying. Taking evidence. Trying to be sure about where you are from and how you got to Norway. This is their job, to know how you got to Norway. And then I waited like four hours in another room. And they said ‘ok, now we take your fingerprints and then to Trandum [a detention center].’ Wow. Trandum it was … ok, I felt it was just a few procedures. One day, two days, one week. After that it will be fine, I thought. This is the thought that made me tick, every day I was saying like that, and the next week, and the next week, and the next week, the next month. And then you forget to count. You just use the life, and you live every day by itself. You eat, you sleep, and you are a slave, like everybody. And sometimes I meet people in the streets here who tell me that they are going to make refugees [seek asylum]. I beg them not to do it! (…) I was telling them like ‘don’t do it [apply for asylum]. It’s horrible. Go to another place if you can’, you know. Because you can’t handle it. But they would just say, ‘No, but not everybody is going to have the same unluck, maybe you have bad luck.’

Drawing on theories on internal or everyday bordering and the production of precarity (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davis 2018; Bendixsen 2020), in this article we explore how the welfare state, set up to cater to a particular category of people, is simultaneously creating welfare state borders internally. By looking at the bordering structures of the welfare state we seek to analyse the complex relation between technologies of government, as ‘the power that conducts’ (Odysseos 2016, 179), and its effect on everyday life of irregular migrants and we suggest understanding this relation as an expression of slow violence. Mani’s reminiscence of the time he applied for asylum in Norway shows how his experience is tainted by waiting, uncertainty and hopelessness. It sheds light on ways in which encounters between the Norwegian bureaucracy and irregular migrants are characterized by a particular, enforced temporality, experiences of unclear processes and outcomes, leading to the impression that the system is set up to discourage refugees from seeking asylum. The concept of slow violence, developed by Nixon (2013) in a different context (environmental destruction and climate change), may accurately describe the effects on Mani’s life inflicted by the slow, faceless, large-scale and abstract bureaucratic machinery which will eventually decide his future opportunities. When we met Mani, he was part of a group of asylum seekers from Palestine whose asylum applications had been rejected and who demonstrated against the Norwegian state’s treatment of them. His recollection cast light on how people become tired in the system of asylum-seeking, its alienating effects, how its process is filled with endless waiting experienced as never-ending, and finally felt as intentionally making them break down to function as a prevention against other people applying for asylum. Mani’s elaboration provides a window into the workings of the neoliberal welfare state as a structuring agent, and how precariousness is experienced as an irregular migrant. This precariousness and its production by the neoliberal welfare state are the focus of this article.

The very concept of a neoliberal welfare state requires a brief elaboration. The term neoliberalism usually refers to marketization and privatization (see Harvey 2005 for a succinct critique), fuelling conservative policies in the global north and SAPs (Structural Adjustment Programmes) in the global south. The welfare state, by contrast, aims to reduce social inequality and provide free services in important domains such as health and education. Welfare states are usually funded largely by taxes, and income tax is progressive.

How, then, can a welfare state be neoliberal? The short answer is that in so far as it conforms to the principles and practices of New Public Management (NPM), which is an ideology aiming to reduce costs while enhancing efficiency in the public sector, the welfare state behaves as though it were a profit-maximizing private enterprise. When university academics are evaluated by the quantity of their publications, or hospital staff are graded according to the number of patients treated, the logic of the market has de facto come to serve as a template not merely for markets as such, but in other sectors as well. It is this kind of welfare state that meets refugees and asylum seekers in Scandinavia in the twenty-first century.

The governmental management of irregular migrants illustrates how sovereign power entails the state's right to decide which lives can flourish and which can be excluded from rights taken for granted by others. Research has shown how irregular migrants respond to everyday bordering and resist their marginal and precarious position (Chimienti 2011; McNevin 2011; Bendixsen 2017). However, there has been less academic attention to the ways in which the precarious subject position of this category of people is being produced in various ways by the neoliberal welfare state. This is worth looking at closely, in particular in a strong welfare state such as Norway because it testifies to the power inherent in the state apparatus as a means of differentiating deserving from undeserving residents. All other things being equal, the more the state offers to its citizens, the more difficult it is for irregular migrants to acquire from the state the resources needed to lead a satisfying life because the welfare state regulations are strict, and the third sector is less established.

Increasingly, welfare rights are used as an important technique of control and management of irregular migration (Bendixsen 2019). The regulation of the categories of people that have access to welfare state services and workfare-oriented policies and practices, produces ideas of deservingness and an inclusion/exclusion dynamic, and contributes to generate a welfare state–migration management nexus. As we will argue, precarious subject positions are produced through these mechanisms, which lead to an unequal distribution of human rights among residents in the country.

We ask: How is the welfare state producing precarious subject positions? In which ways have the Norwegian welfare state policies and practices become part of the management of mobility and migration? How is the Norwegian welfare state transformed in this process? To deal with these questions, we will draw on long-term fieldwork and interviews with irregular migrants of different nationalities in Norway. Irregular migrants’ irregularity as a legal status is foremost legally constituted. In Norway, a large percentage of those living irregularized have applied for asylum, received negative answers on their asylum application and overstayed the date of exit. The precarious position embraces a large category of differently positioned people, including EU/EEA homeless migrants (Misje 2020). In focus here are irregular migrants as a particular form of precarious subject, and we aim to disentangle how the precarious subject position is produced by the welfare state. This subject position is lived out, experienced and resisted in various ways by irregular migrants (see Bendixsen 2020), which is not the scope of this article. Instead, we seek to tease out the particularity of the welfare state production of marginalized and vulnerable positions, an apparatus which is simultaneously established partly, and paradoxically, to protect people from succumbing to such precarious positions.

Irregularization of migration has been portrayed as desired by neoliberal states because it offers a labour force which, through its deportability, becomes flexible, dispensable, subordinated and deprived of rights (De Genova 2016; Ellermann 2009). We do not start from the assumption that the Norwegian state ‘needs’ and consciously creates precarious subjects, but rather seek to explore empirically how precariousness is established and intensified by the welfare state beyond their deportability. Thus, we are concerned with the ways in which the welfare state creates a precarious subject position of people who live ‘illegally’ in Norway. While much research has showed that being deportable contributes to the precarious position, we will here contribute to the discussion on precariousness in showing how it is produced and constituted at the micro-level through the welfare state ordering. Our concern is the particular governmental conduct by welfare state orders, although these are clearly linked to state governmentality more generally.

After a methodological note we provide a short discussion of the border and precarity literature. Subsequently, we argue that precarity is produced by the welfare state in three main ways: (a) through demarcation and diversification of rights; (b) through governmentality of time and temporality, such as the imposition of waiting; and (c) through access or lack of access to services in the welfare state, including digital exclusion. The aim is, briefly, to show how the neoliberal welfare state is managing irregular migrants through slow violence and in what sense the outcome is a precarious subject position. We will finally suggest some implications of the current formation of the welfare state, such as the entrance of the third sector into the welfare states’ domain.

1.2. Methodological note

Bendixsen conducted mixed-method research intermittently between January 2011 and December 2015, pursuing participant observation regularly in a tent camp organized by irregular migrants that demonstrated in Oslo for 18 months, and did fieldwork during public demonstrations and events. Bendixsen also interviewed more than 50 irregular migrants in Bergen and Oslo, some of whom she contacted at the Healthcare Center for Paperless in Oslo, others during the different mobilization events for irregular migrants. The focus of the fieldwork and interviews was the everyday life of irregular migrants and their navigation in the welfare state.

It is estimated that there are between 10,000 and 56,000 irregular migrants in Norway, and as indicated by this very wide interval, it is difficult, if not impossible, to assess the size of a population that by definition evades counting (Zhang 2008). Whilst not all irregular migrants in Norway are asylum seekers, many arrived as such, but became irregular following the final rejection of their asylum claim, then overstaying the legal date of exit. While some irregular migrants may be included in the category of deportable (De Genova 2016), others are not considered deportable by the police or government, depending on a person’s legal and documented situation and the international relations Norway has with the country of origin.

The irregular migrants interviewed and encountered during fieldwork were mostly male, single and between 18 and 40 years old. They had been living in Norway between one and 15 years and came from various national and ethnic backgrounds, the largest national groups being Palestinians, Iraqi, Kurds, Ethiopians and Afghans. All had been through the asylum system, and most had lived in governmental reception centres, but left after receiving a negative answer on the asylum application. During fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, some few were still living in the reception centre, while a majority had left because they feared deportation or because they sought income and were now living with friends, family, or acquaintances. Conversations lasted between 1 and 3 h, and Bendixsen met some of the irregular migrants several times, over a period of a year and a half.

We are keenly aware of the ethical challenges of doing research on this extremely vulnerable group (Düvell, Vollmer, and Triandafyllidou 2010), and the need to ensure anonymity, as well as sensitivity linked not only to method, but also analysis and dissemination of findings. All participants in the fieldwork were informed about the content of the research, that participation was voluntary, and their right to withdraw at any point. They were also informed that participation would not in any way influence their application process (in cases in which they had ongoing applications with the state). The project was registered with Norsk Senter for Forskningsdata (NSD – Norwegian Data Protection Services).

2. Borders and the production of precarity

Critical border studies have in the last decade showed how borders are everywhere and polysemic (Balibar 2004); border practices operate differently depending on context (Green 2013), and are experienced differently by people depending on race, age, class and gender and their intersections. Borders are not merely an unambiguous, clearly demarcated geographical line; they take place at the airport when arriving, and in everyday life, in the encounter with welfare state gatekeepers when requiring health care or trying to open a bank account (Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2020; Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davis 2018; Bendixsen 2019; see also Andreas 2003). De Genova has argued that the management of access to the European space by those who are not legally accepted, and the framing of their socio-legal relationship to the state, is racialized (2016). The vastly increased and accelerated mobility typically associated with globalization is, accordingly, very unevenly distributed: Some are in a position to deport others, whereas others are deportable.

The labelling of people through legal status and migration categories has become part of the bordering practices of EU and European nation-states (Zetter 2007). The term ‘differential inclusion’ of border control (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013) draws attention to the expression of border control through a combination of compassion and repression (Fassin 2005) and ideas of deservingness. It is part of the legitimation of the ongoing coexisting process of securitization and humanitarianization (Walters 2004). Policymakers are increasingly using humanitarian arguments to justify restrictive migration and border management (i.e. Fassin 2011), conjoining the discourses of enhanced ‘border security’ with that of ‘saving lives’ (Vaughan-Williams 2015). Discourses of humanitarianism have also seeped into the ways in which nation-states govern irregular migrants on their soil, in sharp contrast to the ways in which citizens and legal residents are portrayed as responsible subjects with full rights and obligations. Humanitarian border regimes within the welfare state differentiate irregular migrants and asylum seekers from established residents, limiting their rights e.g. to health care, frequently leaving social and care services to volunteer organizations as a form of humanitarian bordering within the welfare state. As we will show, this creates a particularly precarious situation for groups of people.

In studies of irregular migrants, their precariousness has often been seen as a reflection of their position in the labour market (Şenses 2016), in that neoliberal transformations drive the growth of irregular cross-border migrants. The economist Guy Standing (2011) introduced the concept of the precariat as an emerging class, covering an increasing number of people whose lives are characterized by insecurity, short-term employment and limited labour rights. While it refers to a highly heterogeneous group with very different manifestations in the Global North and the Global South, what brings the members of this loosely defined class together, argues Standing, are feelings of ‘anger, anomie, anxiety and alienation’ (the four A’s, Standing 2011, 22). Instead of viewing the precariat as a specific new class, it could be considered as a structural outcome of post-Fordist capitalist society, reflecting the fact that ‘we are all precarious’ now, rather than as a specific new class (Seymour 2012). Others have compared the idea of the precariat with notions of ‘marginality’ in Latin America in the 1960s, ‘informality’ in Africa in the 1970s and ‘social exclusion’ in Europe in the 1980s (Munck 2013; Cassiman, Eriksen, and Meinert 2022).

The term remains important because it alludes to changes in economy, citizenship and class structures taking place in European welfare states (Schierup and Jørgensen 2016). Marginalization and partial exclusion or precarious inclusion are produced at the banal, mundane and ordinary level, and experienced in everyday life – eating, sleeping, working, taking the bus and socializing (Mayblin, Wake, and Kazemi 2020; see also Andreas 2003).

In the present context, the term precarity is used in the sense of an imposed form of flexibility which, in a highly formalized society such as Norway, subtracts rather than adds opportunities. Bateson (1972) famously defined flexibility as ‘uncommitted potential for change’, that which is fluid rather than fixed, open-ended and relatively free from constraint (see also Eriksen 2016). Flexibility may nevertheless also be seen as imperfect integration: When your agenda is open and you have no commitments, you are supremely flexible yet extremely precarious. Precarity, seen in this way, can accordingly be seen as a lack of integration into domains that are necessary for creating a meaningful life.

Bordering can fruitfully be seen as a social practice (Bürkner 2017) which is part of constituting borders in physical and socio-political spaces through complex differentiation process (Van Houtum and Van Naerssen 2002). We explore how precarity is produced and created at the banal, everyday level. By paying attention to the mundane, we can explore and observe the effects of policy on people’s lives and thus understand how precarity is produced through the neoliberal welfare state. The experience of the welfare state bordering, its production of precarious subjects, are felt in ordinary lives. By exploring the ways in which precariousness is constituted, we also show how slow violence is inflicted upon irregular migrants (cf. Nixon 2013). Slow violence is difficult to pin down because it cannot be traced back to one single perpetrator (Nixon 2013). In the UK, for example, Mayblin (2020) argues that the state inflicts a form of slow violence on those going through the asylum system, and she understands the policy regime differentializing humanity as a technology of ‘slow violence’. Impoverishment, induced by the UK state, is to her slow violence and she argues that impoverishment degrades bodies and minds. This slow end of state violence is a form of Mbembe’s necropolitics, governing through death. People seeking asylum are kept ‘alive, but in a state of injury’ (Mbembe 2003, 21). Galtung (1969, 168) defined violence as ‘when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations.’ Drawing on Galtung’s broad definition of structural violence, Canning (2017, 48) argues that ‘where there is capacity for people to live free from suffering, but no political will exist to implement change to alleviate such suffering, structural violence is present.’ Suffering is a form of political technology of control for those counted as illegitimate (Mayblin 2020, 40).

The harm done to people in the asylum system constitutes slow violence, enabled through the state’s structures. The effects of structural violence (Galtung 1969) and necropolitics are poverty, inequality and exclusion. This slow violence, we argue, is tied to the politics of temporality. The synchronization of activities, notably work, a hallmark of capitalism (Thompson 1967), enables capital accumulation through the control and regimentation of time. It is also essential for state control of its citizens and non-citizens (Mezzadra and Neilson 2013; Auyero 2012), including monitoring and controlling mobility. Auyero (2012, 2) has shown how the state is governing its population through temporal processes, through which ‘political subordination is reproduced.’ Researchers have showed the complex ways in which migration is regulated by time, in addition to space (i.e. Bendixsen and Eriksen 2018; Griffiths 2014; Lakha 2009; Mountz 2011; Fontanari 2017), discussing how people get caught up in a state of «indefinite confinement» (Anderson 2014). The arranging of populations into hierarchies (Walters 2004) through various administrative apparatuses, systems of law and technologies of governance, is also pursued through a temporal regime. Temporal regimes administer and govern borders, where time is an instrument of governance, the management of time through a complex set of actors, laws, policies and discourses to sort and differentiate populations.

To sum up this section: Through the analytical lens of precarity, it is possible to glean novel insights about the transformation of the welfare state as well as the usefulness of the concept of slow violence in describing the condition of irregular migrants. In Norway, the liberalization of the ‘universal’ welfare state has contributed to amplified economic rationality as the basis for decision-making and increased emphasis on personal responsibility (see Schram 2019), with a shift towards a more punitive approach. Market reforms have been the order of the day in Norway since the late 1980s, regardless of government, and former state enterprises such as railways, telephony and postal services have been partly or wholly privatized. The shift to neoliberalism, sometimes through NPM (New Public Management) has been thoroughly documented by local sociologists and historians (e.g. Innset 2020), and the structural reforms have been accompanied by an intensified individualism replacing a more collectivist outlook predominant in the heyday of social democracy in the postwar decades. By no means unique to Norway, similar shifts have been observed across Western Europe since the 1980s. The slow violence inflicted by the neoliberal welfare state on people who are not the incumbents of full rights does not take the shape of routine police violence, random incarceration or even threats to personal security. Rather, it is most readily visible through absences, as noted above: The exclusion and marginalization from society is experienced slowly and quietly, making it comparable to the climate crisis, which is experienced differently from extreme weather events. Slow violence is creeping, slithering and unmarked, yet leads to permanent, perceptible change in one’s life circumstances.

The theoretical contribution of the present article consists in teasing out the mutual relevance of the concepts of precarity, bordering, slow violence and temporal power in effecting exclusion among irregular migrants, as well as indicating ongoing changes of the Norwegian welfare state. The seemingly contradictory concept of the neoliberal welfare state will also be explained.

3. Demarcation: how diversification of rights establishes the ground for parallel services

Norway has several social welfare regulations, including the Social Welfare Act (2009) which provides economic assistance and temporary housing to those in need, and thus contributes to social and economic security (Misje 2020). There is an increasingly diversifying of rights for those who are citizens, legal residents and ‘illegal’ residents. This takes place through laws, regulations and practices, establishing increasingly restrictive welfare policies through administrative regulations and guidelines issued by state departments and directorates (Karlsen 2018). When it comes to public social assistance, the Social Services Act applies as it is stated in §2, ‘for everyone who resides in the kingdom’. Yet, as it also states, there may be regulations ‘which limit the application of the law to persons who are not Norwegian citizens, or who are not resident in the kingdom’. These delimitations have been introduced via circulars and regulations and now also a new guideline from the Directorate of Labor and Welfare which deepens changes in the circular for the Social Services Act valid from February 2018 (Misje 2020). Through these documents, it is clarified that migrants without ‘permanent residence in the kingdom’ are not entitled to individual services except for information, advice and guidance. However, it has been established that in an emergency situation, these migrants can also receive short-term financial assistance and temporary housing. The delimitations have taken place without direct political treatment, and only administratively through circulars and regulations, a process that has been criticized by lawyers in the field of human rights (Misje 2020). This administrative way of implementing these policies and regulations facilitate rapid modifications (Karlsen 2018; Bendixsen 2020). It establishes the regulations as temporary, which also require people operating in the field, such as street-level bureaucrats and those aiming to assist irregular migrants, to stay updated as to which rights are currently legally binding.

The limitation of rights and access to services were of high concern to all irregular migrants we talked with. While some were not certain what social and health rights they had, and what to do in cases of emergency, others were greatly aware of their limited rights, and it shaped how they conceived of themselves as not belonging to society. Some avoided going to the medical doctor unless they feared for their life, others would go to the Emergency Care centre, sometimes with a fake ID. They were all keenly aware of the welfare distinction between those with legal residence in Norway, and its sharp contrast to that of their own rights. For example, Ethan said:

We are the underclass. Look. If you can’t see that; that’s free outside, enjoying everything, enjoying whatever the system, being a part of it. Definitely it hurts, but it makes you strong to fight for your right[s]. And to just hope that we one day get accepted. (Ethiopian 28 years, in Norway for 8 years)

Irregular migrants have difficulties claiming their rights. Irregular migrants’ lack of rights constitutes a de jure exclusion (Noll 2010) and is an element of internal migration control. The exclusionary dynamic works not only through legislation and policies, but also through more subtle practices and encounters with the welfare state. The definition of the outsider through social welfare legislation (Misje 2020) and healthcare regulation becomes part of controlling ‘undesired’ migrants, creating hierarchical relations between people in a society which long has conceived of itself as ‘classless’. Limitation of social rights, as in order European countries, is used as an indirect way of controlling immigration (Hollifield 2000). The tying of entitlements to benefits to immigration status, becomes part of immigration management using social-policy instruments (Ataç and Rosenberger 2019), and in some cases cooperating with return is made contingent on the right to welfare services (Ataç and Rosenberger 2019).

The Norwegian welfare state’s bordering practices include restricting access to the system to a selected category of people. This is achieved partly by the bureaucratic device of defining categories (citizenship, workers, habitual residence), which establishes statutory and welfare access borders between some individuals or categories with full access and some individuals who are excluded. For example, during Bendixsen’s fieldwork, a group of Ethiopian irregular migrants demonstrated for months, setting up a tent next to the main church in Oslo. While they had been working with a tax card for years, due to an administrative error, and thus paid income tax, they had suddenly been denied a tax card, consequently lost their jobs and did not receive any benefits from the welfare state despite having contributed to society. Amadi said:

Yeah, they took our tax card. If you see it this way; I have been – no, we [Ethiopian asylum seekers and irregular migrants] have been working since 2003 or something. I have been working for eight–nine years, paying taxes. What do I have if I go back to my country? I have been paying pension in Norway, I have been paying in all the taxes here in Norway. But still, I can’t even go to the velferdsystem [welfare system]. I don’t enjoy whatever the Norwegians like you enjoy. You, for example, as a Norwegian, you pay taxes. When you pay taxes, you have the right to health system, you have the right for everything. We are not a part of that. Even while we were working, we couldn’t enjoy that. … If you were in my shoes, what would you do? (Ethiopian man, 26 years, in Norway for 9 years)

That welfare services should be reserved only for certain categories who belong to the nation – also called welfare chauvinism, in the sense that ‘welfare services should be restricted to our own’ (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, 212)¹ – has become legitimate following the growing support for right-wing populist parties, the nationalist and border-controlling rhetoric pursued by centre-right parties and sharper discussions about the sustainability of the welfare state (Keskinen, Norocel, and Jørgensen 2016).

One of the neoliberal turns of the welfare state is that access to social protection has become even stronger linked up to ideas of deservingness (see Bendixsen and Näre 2024, this SI), and deserving subjects are those who have (had) a working status and is or has been included in the labour market. Exclusion of irregular migrants is partly legitimated by arguing that the viability of the welfare state presupposes that most people are working and ‘contributing’ by paying tax, and on setting precedence: a too open access to the welfare state might inspire more asylum seekers with ‘unfunded claims’ to arrive in Norway. The former argumentation does not consider that all the irregular migrants we meet aspired to work but were legally prevented. Pushed into poverty, and sometimes social isolation, some migrants turn to precarious working conditions, including sex work, to meet their most basic needs (Price and Spencer 2015; Bendixsen 2020). Poverty becomes a form of sovereign control and a slow violence as they are not provided the opportunity to prosper. If situated inside the asylum system, the migrants are economically dependent on the state because of being excluded from the labour market (Mayblin 2020), while situated outside the asylum system as irregularized they become economically dependent upon grey or informal labour market as the only means of surviving, contributing thus, unwillingly, to increase the informal labour market in Norway, another adversary towards the sustainability of the welfare state.

4. Temporal regimes and precarity

The transition from a flexible temporality to linear clock time as a result of industrialization contributed to the current temporal structure of modern everyday life (e.g. Thompson 1967; Frykman and Lofgren 1979; Glennie and Thrift 2009; Eriksen 2001). Industrial time-measurement and regulation through the linear clock time had a profound bearing on how we perceive time (Damsholt 2020). Today much work-life is not characterized by clocking in and out, and digital technology has contributed to a time/space compression (Harvey 2005), yet the logic of industrial time still pervades everyday life (Wajcman 2014; Damsholt 2020). Different life modes have their own distinct logics of time structuring (Højrup 1983). ‘Thus, time in everyday life is ambiguous and multiple and seems neither to be practised nor experienced in the same way within contemporary households, across recent decades, or by society at large’ (Damsholt 2020, 139), and is also organized and governed by the state.

Studies of irregular migrants and asylum seekers have increasingly underlined the use of temporality and waiting as techniques of control by the state (Agier 2009; Bendixsen and Eriksen 2018; Khosravi 2010; Hyndman and Giles 2011; Griffiths 2014). The exercise of power through regulating time and making people wait (Bourdieu 2000), produces effects of dependency and reinforce marginality of migrant subjects. The politics of temporality as pursued in the neoliberal welfare state also is part of the production of irregular migrants as precarious subjects. Governmentality through temporality includes waiting for answer for the asylum application, waiting for news from one’s family at home or in a third country, postponing one’s education until the family has enough money for food and shelter, delaying marriage, and frequently thus suspending parenthood, because it is not legal to marry as an irregular migrant in Norway or because finding a partner when one cannot make one’s earnings is difficult.

While everyone waits, time governs all citizens, the effects of imposed, open-ended waiting on the lives of irregular migrants is pervasive in that it constrains their ability to lead normal lives. As Damsholt (2020, 139) puts it, ‘[t]ime is lived in an array of social distinctions, in which the time of some people is valued more highly than the time of others’. While time is perceived as a scarce resource for some, others have too much time (Damsholt 2020). Yet, killing time is different if one has access to Netflix and a comfortable sofa, compared to having to spend the cold winter evening in the park because the friend who accommodates you out of compassion has a visitor and thus needs the apartment for himself, as was the case of the irregularized 35-year-old Ethiopian Ari.

The way in which temporality becomes part of structuring and shaping irregular migrants’ precarious subject position, can be exemplified with the situation of Nina, a 38-year-old Palestinian woman born and raised in Qatar. She lived in Norway with her three children as an irregular migrant in Norway. Her asylum application was rejected, and so was her complaint. Nina earned some money through different small cleaning jobs in the informal sector, where she had experienced not being paid in time, not being given the agreed payment, and having to work far more than agreed for the same amount of money. She had no work permit, and so did not file a complaint, but told us that she now took great care in her decision for whom to work. Her children went to public school, and they received assistance from the reception centre. Bendixsen had met Nina at a reception centre situated outside Bergen. One day she met Nina happenstance in Bergen city centre. Nina was upset because she had just experienced a bad situation because her daughter required medical care after an unlucky incidence where she had broken her leg. She was tired and frustrated that she needed the acceptance from the reception centre or someone else for all decisions. She then tells Bendixsen about a serious health condition for which she has not received treatment.

Nina: For us without, you must remember always we are without personal number. For the people with personal number always. For bills, always NAV [Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration] must cover it. If the doctor writes that you need something [i.e. glasses or medical appointment], NAV will cover it. But sometimes this is difficult. These people from NAV say – ‘sorry’ and they will not cover it.

Nina explains that she has a lump in her breast which her GP had discovered and consequently directed her to the state hospital. At the hospital, the medical doctors had informed her that they would wait and see how the lump would develop before providing any medical treatment.

Synnøve: But why do they say it’s not urgent?

Nina: Because I’m without a personal number [a social security ID]. The place in Haukeland [Bergen’s main hospital], Haukeland is always busy. The place, this bed to which you will be admitted, this bed must be for Norwegian people.

While Nina had received negative answer on her asylum application and overstayed the date she should have left Norway, and thus was an irregular migrant, she continued living in the reception centre because she could not support her children without access to formal employment. Like other irregular migrants who remained living in reception centres, she had continued access to her GP, despite that access not being a legal right according to the regulations. Irregular migrants who left the region where they had lived in the reception centre, we noticed, lost touch with their GP and used the Emergency Care Unit or Health Care Center for Paperless in Oslo and Bergen if they needed health care attendance. The case of Nina shows how temporality shapes irregular migrant’s precariousness in various ways; she is not only waiting for her residence permit. Nina is also waiting for a doctor’s appointment and for the hospital to accept her. She fears that a lump inside her breast can become cancer, though as it is not cancer at this moment it cannot be removed by the public health service. The politics of unbelonging through the welfare state’s exclusion suggests how some bodies are not considered as part of the (welfare) state and thus not worthy of protection or support, establishing feelings of unbelonging in that process. It also further reflects the logic of ‘deservingness’ of neoliberal welfare systems where access to health care becomes tied up to perception of deservingness rather than rights.

For irregular migrants, health care entitlements are limited to ‘emergency care’ and ‘health care that is absolutely necessary and cannot wait’ (Ministry of Health and Care Services 2010). While the latter is care that must be provided within two to three weeks to prevent escalation to an emergency state, in practice this is clinically understood as encompassed by ‘emergency care’ and medically ambiguous (Karlsen 2018). Irregular migrants are thus provided only exceptional care. Nina’s right to health care as an irregular migrant presupposes that her illness is defined as an emergency, which in some cases have a temporal aspect: illness like cancer evolves over time and at one moment, it can reach a state where it becomes life-threatening and thus an emergency providing her the right for care. To Nina this implies that while she will not be in pain within this system, as pain will be taken care of, it does not provide her with essential and fundamental care of her well-being and right to prosper. Her illness is accessed in a temporal framing by the university hospital; now the lump in her breast is not conceived of as ‘dangerous enough’ and therefore not yet defined as an emergency. Thus, it can temporarily be put on hold surgically. Nina’s mental health and negative well-being because of living with what she conceives off as a temporal potential explosive in her body that suddenly can turn ill, is not part of this medical assessment.

The limitation of welfare and health care rights to irregular migrants is one means through which the Norwegian government tries to put off ‘insincere’ asylum seekers. For example, in a parliamentary debate in 2017 on the question on providing irregular migrants with the same health rights as those legally living in Norway, the Conservative (Høyre) Minister of Health, Bent Høie, said ‘to give people without permanent residence in Norway the same right to health care as people with permanent residence, could lead to more people coming to Norway to receive free treatment’.² On a similar discussion on 8 March 2021, Høye repeated his argument, to which the Centre Party (SP) and Socialist Left Party (SV) responded that the right to health is a human right, that they had not heard of anyone fleeing their country to receive free health care in Norway, and that it would be socio-economically better to offer health care before it became an emergency.³ Similar use of social and health care restrictions as a way of avoid creating ‘incentives’ for undesired migrants, combining incitement for the migrants to leave and discouragement from coming can be found in other countries (Guentner et al. 2016; Tervonen, Pellander, and Yuval-Davis 2018). Limiting healthcare rights is also part of counteracting ‘health’ migration – the idea that migrants would come to Norway to gain access to health services. Yet, there is no research confirming the existence of such ‘health tourism’. In contrast to this political perception, research has indicated that newly arrived people are healthier than immigrants who have lived in Norway for several years, even when adjusted for age (Kjøllesdal et al. 2019), and immigrants use healthcare services less, including everything from anti-depressive medication to dentistry (e.g. Fadnes and Diaz 2017; NIPH 2017).

Governing migration through limiting or denying health care services, physically and politically marginalize irregular migrants as undesiring of having good health. While the element of emergency care prevents irregular migrants from physically dying, the health regulations and practices establish a hierarchical conception of the human. As Nina says: the hospital bed needs to be kept available to the deserving Norwegian citizen. This slow violence as a mode of operating migration governance through healthcare and temporality has effect on the irregular migrant’s bodies. The violence is structurally produced, and its temporality is slow which is why the violence, and its effects are less apparent. Instead, the harms are wrought gradually and contribute to the precariousness of the migrant subject.

5. Digital bordering: how digitalization of the welfare state creates digital exclusion

The final mode through which the government is producing precarity is through digital bordering, which we consider as a form of digital exclusion by the digitalized welfare state which is not limited to ‘illegal’ citizens but also include citizens who are, to varying degrees, computer illiterate, an affliction typically associated with the elderly. As noted, the dispersal of rights has become part of structural differentiations and play a role in the proliferation of borders in Norway, as in other European nation-states. This dispersal of rights is both making up and indicating the neoliberal direction of the welfare state. In Norway, the digitalization of the welfare state facilitates and testify the neo-liberalization of the welfare state even faster and sharper. The precarious subject positions result from the bordering of the technology of control by the welfare state through mundane banal ways, including what we call digital borders.

‘Digital bordering’ refers to the lack of access to the welfare state due to its access being digitalized. Governments worldwide have become increasingly reliant on digital technologies and e-government, so also the Norwegian welfare state. Much of the Norwegian welfare state services – and arguably much more so than in countries such as the UK, Germany and Finland – are by now set up in such a way that they must be accessed electronically. To be included in the welfare state and its services, residents are dependent upon a personal number which is needed to access a wide range of everyday rights and services, including educational, health, political, tax card, work, etc. Contributing and participating in social and everyday encounters are also increasingly dependent upon computer literacy, buying tickets to concerts, theatre and cinema, flight tickets, etc. is set up to be done online.

The ways in which social inclusion occurs through electronic participation increased noticeably during the Covid-19 pandemic as part of the effort to avoid physical, possible infectious, interactions. Since digital communication is virus-free, the digitization of a broad range of services and activities accelerated during the pandemic, e.g. in healthcare, education and social relations. This development, we argue, contributes to increased digital bordering through the welfare state. This digital border is distinguished from what Chouliaraki and Georgiou (2019, 595) call the digital border, namely ‘the technological and symbolic resources of the border (…) through specific systems of classification to routinely reiterate the inside/outside distinction’. The digital bordering irregular migrants, and others, meet when they live in Norway are defined by their efforts to access services, be they related to health, education, or social relations, – efforts which are halted, prevented or made difficult due to digitalization. One irregularized mother we talked with was devastated because she could not figure out how to provide her daughter with the necessary books for her education as these were only available online. To access them online she needed a personal number, which she did not have as an irregularized migrant. The example of Mahdi can further illustrate how digitalization creates exclusionary effects in everyday life and in efforts to create a future.

When we met Mahdi, he was a 22-year-old man from Iran and had lived 7 years in Norway with his mother. He was a Christian and an active member of the AUF (Labour Party youth section). His sister lived in Germany and had recently married (‘We could not attend the wedding because we could not leave Norway [due to lack of legal identity papers]. It made my mother very sad – the wedding of ones’ daughter is a big thing, you know’) and had family scattered around in Europe. Mahdi had the right to attend secondary school because he was below 18 years old. However, as they left the reception centre, Mahdi had to work in addition to taking his second grade at secondary school. He worked from 3 to 11 pm every weekday. Mahdi recalls: ‘I was almost falling asleep at school. The teachers told me to focus on school. But when I told them [about the situation], they understood that I actually had to work.’ Upon completing secondary school, Mahdi paid to improve his grades through private tuition because he would otherwise not be able to enter the university degree he desired. Yet, lacking a personal ID number, he was unable to register online to take the exam seeing his efforts and money go in vain.

This is not an unusual predicament for irregular migrants. Citizens and legal residents in Norway have become digital citizens, in the sense that for Norwegian residents to fulfil their duties and obtain their rights, they must be digitally competent and have a personal number to be digitalizable. The digital platforms of welfare services are supposedly implemented for fast, reliable, and undifferentiated access to welfare. For those unable to access the digital platform, for various reasons including limited access to computer, computer illiteracy, or as in the case of Mahdi, a lack of a personal number, digital welfare services produce digital bordering.

The digital border is where the everyday, banal borders of participation in society takes the meaning of obstructing, impeding, and slowing down everyday activities, such as making a dental or medical appointment, or buying books needed for your children’s education through the obligatory online system. Digital bordering in this case happens not through technologies at the passport control or FRONTEX, but through the welfare state’s implementation and facilitation of their services through online access. This creates a particular form of electronic inclusion–exclusion dynamic, in that simple transactions such as making doctor’s appointments which should be done online, becomes a complicated affair. Those who have a personal number (and are technologically skilled) have easy access to welfare state rights, while those who lack a personal number or a DUF number face difficulties to navigate alternative forms of access, for example to access their examination as with Mahdi.⁴ The neoliberal move towards increased efficiency, which inevitably leads to impersonalization, in this case through digitalization of the welfare state, enforces the internal borders between those legally entitled from those who do not have legal stay and thus should not be included in the welfare state. This must be assessed in the context of neoliberalization of the welfare state, not only characterized by an increased privatization of some of its functions, the roll-back of welfare services, but also of digitalization of increasingly many service rights in the public sector. Digitalization makes the differentiation of rights easier to implement for the welfare state, as the system becomes watertight in ways making loopholes and affordances enabling flexibility difficult to identify and exploit both for those street-level bureaucrats who seek to circumvent the system, and for irregular migrants who try to navigate the system. Digitalization constitutes a form of slow violence through a practice of digital bordering, rendering an already precarious group even more marginal in relation to the welfare state, reminding them that they lack membership in this particular organization.

7. Conclusions

Precariousness among irregular migrants in the welfare state Norway is characterized by the limited and unstable right to access welfare provisions, and by temporality as a governing technique in how the state is dealing with this population. The digitalization of the welfare state, aiming to improve its efficiency, limits de facto access to rights and facilitates the practice of differentiating rights. The broader consequence of this digital bordering is a process yet to be studied empirically and theoretically.

Yet, one consequence of the fragmentation of the welfare state and withdrawal of public services has led to new forms of marginalization and exclusion. Volunteer organizations are increasingly providing more services to certain groups in need, including irregular migrants but also homeless people, the poor and migrants. Run by religious organizations, charities, humanitarians and volunteers, these services are not always specifically set up for irregular migrants but charter to anyone who falls out of the all-embracing welfare state. These organizations are frequently funded by the Norwegian state, which effectively outsources some of its services, just as it has partly privatized telecommunications, postal services, and railways.

The responses by the civil society can be interpreted as challenges to the governmental practices of bordering within the state (which also affect the understanding of citizenship, see Anderson 2024, this SI) and the ongoing social and legal exclusion (Agustín and Jørgensen 2019). Precariousness is thus also produced by leaving care of this population to be performed by the third sector, the voluntary organizations, making care temporary and dependable on their resources. Care through this sector is provided through humanitarian reasoning and not through rights. The increased role of the volunteer sector, and the differentiations in access to the welfare state, indicate the slow violence irregular migrants are subjected to. This abdication makes it evident that the state does not see irregular migrants as possessing deservingness (see also Riedner and Hess 2024, this SI).

Digital bordering and digital exclusion point to the banal everyday ways of border construction set up in a welfare state which is becoming ever more digital. The outsourcing of welfare state services, which in this case indicate a duality in government policy, where assistance to irregular migrants is tacitly tolerated in so far as it is not officially sanctioned, contributes to the temporary, volatile, and precarious character of the services received by this group. The systematic conversion of the irregular migrants’ time into waiting is another practice indicating that neoliberal welfare state bordering systematically turns irregular migrants into a precarious group unable to survive in the formal sector of the economy. One effect of this governance through welfare is a form of slow violence: occurring gradually, it is not considered as violence at all (Nixon 2013; Davies and Isakjee 2019, 214). This slow violence of the neoliberal welfare state both works and is legitimized through the legal, policy and welfare structures of the state. It is slow, because the violence is brought about gradually, not only through the asylum system as we saw in the introduction through Mani’s experience, but also through how the welfare state manages irregular migrants. The delayed harm to humans through hostile environments and effects at the level of everyday life, makes the violence and its perpetrator invisible. The irregular migrant’s suffering is individualized and dispersed, and their precariousness and impoverishment affect and is affected by their limited capacity to absorb risk (Mayblin 2020), while simultaneously being continuously confronted with risky activities. This precariousness is not only a poverty-related suffering, caused by the lack of legal means to gain employment, but also an effect of border control operating through the welfare state, its slowness sometimes interrupted by more abrupt moments of violence such as deportation.

We suggest that the welfare state’s implication in migration management is legitimated by the Norwegian state’s principles of universalism and egalitarianism, simultaneously as the seeping of migration management into welfare state principles and practices as well as the neoliberalization of the welfare state contributes to curbing the position of egalitarianism as a principle and value, showing in no uncertain terms that irregular migrants are not members of it.

Although this article has focused on welfare state services and irregular migrants’ rights, the analysis could be extended to include other aspects of the neoliberal welfare state and other groups which increasingly find themselves in a segregated society where egalitarian state practices are being replaced by market mechanisms, contributing to growing inequality, even in the ostensibly least unequal country in the world.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Notably, there are different definitions of welfare chauvinism, see i.e. Jørgensen and Thomsen (2016) for a discussion.

2 Available at Skriftlig spørsmål – stortinget.no, accessed 04.03.21.

3 Sak nr. 2 [12:38:22] – stortinget.no, accessed 04.03.21

4 The DUF number is a registration number in the computer system of the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration (UDI). In Norway, everyone applying for asylum or for a residence permit will be assigned a DUF number.