Negotiating the Boundaries of Social Membership: Undocumented Migrant Claims-making in Sweden and Spain

Abstract

In this article, I address the role organisations and networks play in mobilising for the rights of undocumented migrants and in setting agendas for their inclusion and social membership. I compare two societies with different frameworks of welfare and migration regimes. The empirical material used in this article consists of 44 interviews with actors involved in the processes I define as negotiating social membership in Stockholm and Barcelona: policy-makers, immigration officials, trade unions, NGO activists and the undocumented migrants themselves. In both Sweden and Spain, mobilising groups have been important for the recognition of undocumented migrants. Until recently, undocumented migrants were largely invisible in the Swedish context, often living in extreme marginalisation and precariousness. In Spain, where the informal labour market is more extended and boundaries between the legal and the illegal are less pronounced, migrants have had greater opportunities to settle and to some degree integrate into society. The political opportunities for mobilised actors vary in relation to both the welfare and migration regimes, the structure of the labour market, and more subtle factors as receptiveness for claims-making at a certain time, tolerance for informality in society, and choices of individual actors in crucial positions.

The Politics of Disintegration

“…Particularly where rigorous exclusion would create significant costs or contradictions, however, migrant irregularity is often more or less routinely accommodated within existing organisational structures and institutional logics (Schweitzer 2018b). Conceptually but also empirically, this implies a certain level of recognition and incorporation of formally irregular migrants and can thus not only make visible but also further their claims for social membership Hellgren 2014;Schweitzer 2017b). The next section theorises the underlying negotiation processes in more detail to better understand the crucial role that local institutions and individual street-level bureaucrats (can) play within the broader politics of (dis) integration.…”

Integration Processes and Policies in Europe

“…Hellgren ( 2014 ) argues that undocumented migrants are more accommodated in Spain than in Sweden. Until 1 July 2013 undocumented migrants in Sweden had-in contrast to recognized asylum seekers-no right to basic healthcare and schooling for their children.…”

“…Undocumented migrants in the former fi ll a major "care gap", providing cheap labour in healthcare, childcare, and domestic services. While in Sweden undocumented migrants 'refl ect a moral dilemma and challenge to the principles of the welfare state', in Spain 'the presence of individuals without permission to stay may not be problematic for any moral reasons, or by principle' (Hellgren 2014(Hellgren , 1184.…”

Negotiating Solidarity: Collective Actions for Precarious Migrant Workers’ Rights in Sweden

“…Milkman et al, 2010;Frank, 2012;Woolfson et al, 2012;Lindberg, 2013;Hellgren, 2014;Selberg, 2014Selberg, , 2016Neergaard, 2015;Moksnes, 2016); and, those on political activism rights by organised migrants through local and global solidarity movements (see e.g. Laubenthal, 2007;Ålund and Reichel, 2007;Düvell, 2007;Kings, 2011;Andrijasevic, 2013;Atger, 2013;Schierup et al, 2014;Agustín and Bak Jørgensen, 2016).…”

“…Further, research on undocumented migrants and irregular migration has also been growing in Sweden during the last couple of years (Sager et al, 2016;see Ascher, 2009;Khosravi, 2010;Holgersson, 2011;Sager, 2011;Sigvardsdotter, 2012). More recently, several studies have provided insight into the situation of undocumented migrants on the labour market, with a particular focus on the informal economy (see Gavanas, 2011;Gavanas and Calleman, 2013;Sager, 2015;Öberg, 2016) and the relation to the trade unions (see Frank, 2012;Hellgren, 2014;Neergaard, 2015a;Selberg, 2014Selberg, , 2016Moksnes, 2016).…”