Firewalls: A necessary tool to enable social rights for undocumented migrants in social work

Abstract

Firewalls are clear divisions between border policing and the provision of basic social rights. They have a dual character: to ensure that no information collected with the purpose of safeguarding basic social rights should be shared for immigration control purposes; and that migrants should not be subject to immigration control when being present at, or in the vicinity, of religious, private and public institutions upholding and providing social rights. This article suggests a normative argument for ‘firewalls’ in the context of social work and develops the concept theoretically as a principle practised and negotiated at different scales.

Introduction to special issue: Bordering practices in the social service sector – experiences from Norway and Sweden

“…A number of incidents suggest that social service providers -including both civil society-and public organizations -have become targets for, and sometimes active participants in, attempts to monitor and police asylum-seekers and other migrant categories. Examples range from a decision of the Swedish Border Police to raid a summer camp for undocumented migrant children (see Lind 2020); via requirements placed on municipal social services to provide the Border Police with the home addresses of irregular migrants (see Hermansson et al 2020); to formalized collaborations between national migration authorities and civil society organizations (CSOs) aiming at motivating, for instance, Moroccan street children to 'voluntarily' return to their country of origin (Holmlund 2020). These developments raise questions about the complex relationship(s) between social service provision and bordering practices.…”

The Politics of undocumented migrant childhoods: agency, rights, vulnerability

“…During my PhD studies, I published additional stand-alone articles that are not included in this compilation thesis. However, the methodology chapter (4) builds partly on a published method article (Lind, 2017); the discussion in the conclusion is partly inspired by another article I took part in writing with a number of colleagues (Hermansson et al, 2020) and some of the other additional articles (Lind & Persdotter, 2017;Lundberg & Lind, 2017) are referred to and are drawn upon to construct the argument presented in Article 3.…”

“…By coming back to these questions repeatedly as a part of the ethics-asprocess approach, and often on the initiative of the participants, I was inspired to try and write, together with researchers and activists, other kinds of texts outside of academia in parallel with the construction of academic papers that engaged more directly in the current debates. 14 More recently, I have also presented the work of colleagues and myself at non-academic conferences, arguing, for example, for "firewalls" (Hermansson et al, 2020), which I discuss in more detail in the conclusion, and taken part in a complaint filed by researchers and activists to the Parliamentary Ombudsman 15 against the actions of the Social Services and the Border Police when they shared addresses. This has made it possible for me to say with a little more confidence that my work may benefit people in deportability at least indirectly, since the slow production of academic texts can be hard to justify sometimes when arguing for one's research in the field.…”

“…One issue that holds potential for both future research and political work regarding irregular migration on a relatively pragmatic level is the issue of "firewalls" (Carens, 2008;Crépeau & Hastie, 2015;Hermansson et al, 2020, see also ECRI, 2016. A firewall is the principle that rights provisions for undocumented migrants should be separated from border control.…”

“…I have, together with several colleagues, worked on a theoretical development of the firewall principle (Hermansson et al, 2020) in which we discuss how firewalls are constructed and negotiated at different scales, from personal attitudes among social rights providers, via informal and formal policies at NGOs and institutions to firewalls inscribed into national and international law. Firewalls are not an answer to the question of what rights undocumented migrants should be entitled to.…”