Refugee and forced migrants are not welcome in Europe’s diminished welfare states

Abstract

The recent arrivals of refugees from the Middle East fleeing war and persecution, and forced migrants escaping poverty, mostly from Asia and Africa, have fundamentally challenged European states' commitment to solidarity with these vulnerable populations seeking protection. Researchers have identified a range of social and individual factors that may facilitate or impede societies' willingness to receive refugees and migrants. However, less attention has been devoted to how their reception may be linked with diminished provision of public services for citizens and declining welfare states in many countries in Europe. This article considers how the ascendance of the neoliberal ideology and its key shifts in public policy contributed to a growing sense of insecurity and precarity in industrialized countries over recent decades and has affected people's willingness to assist and accept them. It brings together insights from a variety of disciplines to better understand social policy developments and its relation to refugee and forced migration. It concludes that a feminist psychosocial conception of relationality provides a basis for rethinking our approaches to these important issues by politicizing the ethical obligation to protect the lives of unknown others.

Solidarity in crisis? Community responses to refugees and forced migrants in the Greek islands

“…Yet the recent explosive rise in inequality across Western societies indicates that we may now be moving ever further from this goal (Kymlicka, 2015: 1). Having espoused neoliberal public policies, policymakers often stoke people’s fears to deflect attention from their failure to address the needs of the most vulnerable –refugees, forced migrants, and their own populations (Fotaki, 2020). The danger of governments propagating fear is immense, as it permits us to neglect even the most vulnerable and to consider their essential human needs as somehow of lesser value than our own.…”

“…After the official policy of limiting refugees’ and forced migrants’ arrivals by any means possible culminated in the EU–Turkey deal in March 2016 (Amnesty International, 2016; Qiblawi et al, 2020), fear and fatigue has displaced compassion. As many Europeans are influenced by a discourse of racialized “others” who threaten national security (Berry et al, 2015; Dempster and Hargrave, 2017; Papademetriou and Banulescu-Bogdan, 2016), national identity (Dixon et al, 2018) and the stability of welfare systems (Banting and Kymlicka, 2017; Fotaki, 2020; Holck and Muhr, 2017), it seems particularly important to establish how solidarity initiatives to help refugees arise, and what makes them successful.…”

Why Do We Desire and Fear Care: Toward developing a holistic political approach

“…Underpinning this is the idea of the artificially created scarcity through the attacks on publicly provided services as wasteful and inefficient and the retrenchment of different forms of welfare. At the same time, having espoused neoliberal public policies, policymakers often stoke people’s fears to deflect attention from their failure to address the needs of the most vulnerable – refugees, displaced people and various dispossessed groups within their own populations (Fotaki, 2020). Such discourses responsibilize individuals and entire social groups by making them ineligible to receive care in the public system while labelling their needs as personal choices.…”