Newcomers Navigating The Welfare State

The topic of social assistance for migrant newcomers often sparks heated public debate and remains a prominent concern on the policy agenda. Society has experienced a growing level of diversity. This reality gives rise to new demands and changing profiles of individuals who benefit from welfare services. Welfare institutions, which are responsible for providing social assistance, play a crucial role in granting access to social benefits for newcomers. Moreover, the provision of social assistance can significantly influence the settlement and integration processes of migrants. This book provides empirical insights into the alignment between the needs of newcomers and the service provided to them. It examines the accessibility of social assistance for newcomers from a comprehensive perspective, encompassing aspects such as gaining access (including equal access for all) and service availability. By focusing on the Belgian Public Centres for Social Welfare as a case study, the authors explore the policies and practices related to social assistance and labour market activation for newcomers and the factors that influence individuals’ access to their rights. By incorporating the perspectives of all the relevant stakeholders involved, drawing on the insights of social workers and managers as well as the experiences of newcomers themselves, this book offers a unique understanding of the interactions between immigrants, the welfare state, and street-level bureaucrats. It provides valuable insights for enhancing service provision, striving for a more inclusive approach.

Since 1965 the foreign-born population of the United States has swelled from 9.6 million or 5 percent of the population to 45 million or 14 percent in 2015. Today, about one-quarter of the U.S. population consists of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given the sizable representation of immigrants in the U.S. population, their health is a major influence on the health of the population as a whole. On average, immigrants are healthier than native-born Americans. Yet, immigrants also are subject to the systematic marginalization and discrimination that often lead to the creation of health disparities. To explore the link between immigration and health disparities, the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity held a workshop in Oakland, California, on November 28, 2017. This summary of that workshop highlights the presentations and discussions of the workshop.

Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

Explores the interplay between the recent broader changes affecting the welfare state (fiscal crisis, cost containment, privatization, etc) and the restructuring of social service work, and the implications for the line practitioner.

Migration, Family and the Welfare State explores understandings and practices of integration in the Scandinavian welfare societies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden through a comprehensive range of detailed ethnographic studies. Chapters examine discourses, policies and programs of integration in the three receiving societies, studying how these are experienced by migrant and refugee families as they seek to realize the hopes and ambitions for a better life that led them to leave their country of origin. The three Scandinavian countries have had parallel histories as welfare societies receiving increasing numbers of migrants and refugees after World War II, and yet they have reacted in dissimilar ways to the presence of foreigners, with Denmark developing tough immigration policies and nationalist integration requirements, Sweden asserting itself as a relatively open country with an official multicultural policy, and Norway taking a middle position. The book analyses the impact of these differences and similarities on immigrants, refugees and their descendants across three intersecting themes: integration as a welfare state project; integration as political discourse and practice; and integration as immigrants’ and refugees’ quest for improvement and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

​This volume introduces a strategic interdisciplinary research agenda on arrival infrastructures. Arrival infrastructures are those parts of the urban fabric within which newcomers become entangled on arrival, and where their future local or translocal social mobilities are produced as much as negotiated. Challenging the dominance of national normativities, temporalities, and geographies of “arrival,” the authors scrutinize the position and potential of cities as transnationally embedded places of arrival. Critically interrogating conceptions of migrant arrival as oriented towards settlement and integration, the volume directs attention to much more diverse migration trajectories that shape our cities today. Each chapter examines how migrants, street-level bureaucrats, local residents, and civil society actors build—with the resources they have at hand—the infrastructures that accommodate, channel, and govern arrival.

This handbook provides a review of promising practices and strategies facilitating immigrant integration, especially in new settlement areas. The purpose of this handbook is to foster a constructive approach to newcomers and community change.

Reimagining 'Irish' identity on a uniquely intimate level, this richly thoughtful work aspires to a more egalitarian society in Ireland, Europe and beyond, encouraging readers to rethink their own national identities in turn.

This book discusses the ways civil society initiatives open communities to newcomers and why, how, and under what circumstances some are more welcoming than others, exploring the importance of transgressive cosmopolitanism as a basis for creating more inclusive and pluralistic societies. The question of how to live together in increasingly multicultural, multi-ethnic, and multireligious societies is a pressing political and policy issue, particularly as we witness a rise in right-wing populism and anti-immigrant sentiments. This book addresses the limitations of approaches that seek to secure borders, preventing the arrival of newcomers altogether, or that vacillate between assimilation and multiculturalism. The authors explore the concept of cosmopolitanism and its utility, by theorizing from real-world examples, including Germany’s Welcome Culture and Denmark’s Kind Citizens movements and other smaller-scale initiatives, such as arts and museum projects, kitchen hubs, and shared living accommodation. Interdisciplinary in nature and bringing conceptual discussions together with everyday examples, this book focuses on forms of activity generally left out of wider debates around protest and social movement literature. It emphasizes different types of activities undertaken by civil society groups, who do not necessarily self-identify as political, but whose activities can counter right-wing populism. This dialogue between concepts and everyday politics makes the volume a very useful companion to classroom discussion and will facilitate its own exchange between scholars, activists, and practitioners.

After all the green beer has been poured and the ubiquitous shamrocks fade away, what does it mean to be Irish American besides St. Patrick’s Day? Who’s Your Paddy traces the evolution of “Irish” as a race-based identity in the U.S. from the 19th century to the present day. Exploring how the Irish have been and continue to be socialized around race, Jennifer Nugent Duffy argues that Irish identity must be understood within the context of generational tensions between different waves of Irish immigrants as well as the Irish community’s interaction with other racial minorities. Using historic and ethnographic research, Duffy sifts through the many racial, class, and gendered dimensions of Irish-American identity by examining three distinct Irish cohorts in Greater New York: assimilated descendants of nineteenth-century immigrants; “white flighters” who immigrated to postwar America and fled places like the Bronx for white suburbs like Yonkers in the 1960s and 1970s; and the newer, largely undocumented migrants who began to arrive in the 1990s. What results is a portrait of Irishness as a dynamic, complex force in the history of American racial consciousness, pertinent not only to contemporary immigration debates but also to the larger questions of what it means to belong, what it means to be American.