ABSTRACT
National immigration controls are no longer carried out solely by specialised ‘gate-keepers’ at external borders. Internal controls have partly shifted to administrative employees, welfare officers and private actors (Guiraudon and Lahav 2000; Jordan et al. 2003). Fencing off public service from outsiders is particularly important for strong welfare states such as the Netherlands (Engbersen 2003). Since the early 1990s the Dutch government has aimed at increasing its influence on the process of immigration. Although this aim has been fuelled by the electoral turnaround of 2002, the process started long before. Illegal immigration and asylum in particular have been the centre of attention for over a decade now. Whereas the number of asylum claims has dropped significantly, there are still illegal immigrants and paradoxically their number may even have increased.1 To a
certain extent, illegal immigrants have responded to new regulations and controls by behaving more unobtrusively and by going deeper underground, thereby escaping detection (Van der Leun and Kloosterman 2005). At the same time, it must be noted that official policies only have a limited influence on illegal immigrants’ life chances. In this respect, an immigrant’s embeddedness within the labour market and within ethnic communities are often more important. Family members offer housing, information and moral support, and employers often welcome the cheap and flexible labour illegal immigrants can supply. What has received less attention in the literature so far is the fact that, for a
number of reasons, a wide variety of individuals, networks, formal and informal organisations linked to the state in different ways also offer various kinds of support to illegal immigrants. Research in the Netherlands has shown that this support takes place despite a continuous stream of government measures systematically to exclude illegal immigrants from public services. It raises several questions with respect to internal migration control. It is widely acknowledged that the gaps between immigration policies and
implementation are huge when it comes to dealing with illegal immigrants (Joppke 1998; Cornelius et al. 2004), but there is little insight into the concrete processes that take place within these gaps. This account aims at studying the interplay between the implementation of the Dutch ‘discouragement policy’ and opportunities for illegal immigrants who are legally excluded. It takes into account both the agency of lower-level officers and the immigrants concerned (Engbersen 2001). Both are more than passive recipients of policy measures. Together they may be able to create and exploit loopholes that arise out of the inevitable ambivalence of policies that try to deal with illegal immigration (Van der Leun 2003). In addressing the question of who makes immigration policy, this analysis concentrates on actors within public and semi-public welfare state organisations in crucial domains of the Dutch welfare state. These issues are of relevance for the ongoing debate on the ability of states
to control illegal migration and illegal residence at a time of globalisation and open economies (Guiraudon and Joppke 2001). Although stemming illegal migration is a top priority for many states, it is also clear that (im)migration policies constantly misfire and backfire (Sassen 1996; Freeman 1998; Joppke 1998). Qualifications like ‘non-policy as a policy’ or ‘symbolic policy’ evidently refer to this gap between rules and outcomes (Jahn and Straubhaar 1999; Cornelius et al. 2004). The large gap between these policies and the observed outcomes has led to a heated debate about the abilities of states to control migration. Some argue that it is primarily external pressures – such as transnationalisation, globalisation, human rights discourses and supranational policies – that undermine the sovereignty of the state in this respect (Hollifield 1992; Soysal 1994; Jacobson 1996; Sassen 1999). Others question the empirical validity of the claims made. They argue that states are still very much in control and that it is domestic laws and policies rather than forces
from outside the national states that limit migration policies (Brubaker 1994; Freeman 1998; Joppke 1998; Lahav 1998). This debate focuses on the extent to which states are willing and able to control unsolicited migration flows. In a careful analysis of the developments in the field of migration control in the last decade, Guiraudon and Lahav (2000) argue that Western European states are not losing control, but that they are rapidly adapting to internal and external pressures by adopting a specific mixture of remote-control measures. They point to the fact that all European states are now shifting their responsibilities in the field of migration ‘up, out and down’. Shifting up refers to forms of international or supranational cooperation, such as within the EU framework. Shifting out refers to the role of private parties like airline carriers which face sanctions when they transport people without documents (Guiraudon 2001). The delegation of control-based tasks to (semi) public workers, meanwhile, is a clear example of shifting down. This account focuses on the last of these. Whereas the central dilemma of advanced welfare states that are
confronted with immigration is drawing the line between members and non-members (Faist 1996), it is obvious that the responsibility to do so is increasingly being shifted down to ‘gatekeepers’ of the welfare state. In the Netherlands this process was particularly the case when the Linking Act of 1998 was enacted in order to exclude illegal immigrants systematically from public services. The crux of this voluminous law is that the entitlement of immigrants to a whole range of (semi-)public provisions such as social benefits, health care, housing and education, is made conditional on their residential status (Van der Leun 2003). Although Guiraudon and Lahav (2000: 177) seem to assume that the interests of ‘new actors’ in remote migration control coincide with those of the central state, it is still unclear whether and how the delegation of responsibilities has affected the discretionary freedom of the workers concerned. More specifically, we might wonder how far agents in the fields of health care, housing or education are willing and able to engage in control-based activities that do not necessarily coincide with their professional opinions (see Hasenfeld 1983). In pursuit of an answer to this question, this study explores the extent to
which policies that seek to exclude illegal immigrants from welfare provisions are realised in practice. Leading questions in interviews with professionals2
were: How do they act when they encounter illegal immigrants in practice? Do they always exclude them from services? Do they experience certain dilemmas as a consequence? To what extent have the new rules influenced decisions? Are the rules applied to the letter or are they modified? By having two rounds of interviewing and by including four social policy sectors, the research design allows for comparisons over time and across sectors. The research was part of a larger study during which hundreds of illegal immigrants were interviewed between 1994 and 2001 (see Engbersen et al. 2002). Before addressing the main questions, illegal immigration to the
Netherlands will be briefly put into the context of legal migration and
Immigration
immigration controls. Then a theoretical framework is provided with which practices of implementation within public and semi-public organisations are studied. We then turn to practices prior to the introduction of the Linking Act, before reviewing what followed in its aftermath. The essay concludes by briefly touching upon the question of what to expect in the near future given the anti-immigration climate in the Netherlands that has developed in recent years.
