ABSTRACT
Family reunification is often ‘the next step’ for people who have been granted international protection, as they cannot return to their homelands. Based on qualitative research, this chapter describes the difficulties families but also social professionals face in making the right to family reunification count. Both are confronted with a complex ‘policy assemblage of family reunification’, wherein interactions between components of the policy assemblage create a range of thresholds making family reunification difficult. In the gap between ‘rights on paper’ and ‘rights in practice’, social professionals are forced into ‘welfare bricolage’, deploying creative practices of transnational social work.
