
The Danish welfare state is designed to protect and support people in need. However, refugees experience hyper-precarity related to a restrictive socio-legal regime connecting them to the state. Based on 4 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and around a local community organisation, including 35 qualitative interviews with refugees, social workers and volunteers, this publication examines the hyper-precarious processes that arise from the country's immigration and labour regimes.
The article draws on the concepts of precarity and social navigation, focusing on the interface between individual agency and social forces. By exploring how refugees navigate complex state connections and expectations of self-reliance articulated in the national integration programme, it contributes to an understanding of hyper-precarity as ambiguous processes producing subjectivities of not only victimisation and despair, but also fragile spaces of sociality, hope and resistance in rural contexts.
Key conclusions
The authors of this analysis article unpack the entanglement of immigration and labour market regimes by examining the processual aspects of precarity in practice, turning the question of what precarity is into an analysis of what precarity does.
The Danish Finance Act 2019 represents the most recent example of continuous tightening as far as refugee policies are concerned. It reduces access to permanent residency, focuses on repatriation and entrenches rights to social benefits, which fundamentally shapes the conditions of everyday life for refugees. The country's increasingly restrictive immigration laws shatter all hope of building a future in Denmark, as illustrated in the following quotes from Syrian refugees shared within the article:
‘I had made a plan. I would attend college and then go to university. However, when I heard about the Finance Act I thought; Ok, now we will be kicked out. I do not think about education now. I will find a job and make a little money, because I will be kicked out’....‘The first thing I do in the morning is to check my phone to see if the Minister of Immigration and Integration has proposed any new restrictions to the laws’....‘There is no hope for us in Denmark. No hope’.
According to the article, Denmark's socio-legal immigration regime constitutes a fundamental part of the hyper-precarious process shaping everyday lives of refugees in Denmark, producing severe concerns, frustration and despair. Even though some are able to navigate structural forces by securing some form of employment, this employment does not usually provide for a long-term plan, financial stability or the security of permanent residency. Rather, it reinforces a precarious position in a labour market characterised by low-paid, temporary and unskilled jobs. Hyper-precarity is not solely produced by state-initiated changes in the socio-legal regime governing immigration, but also by multiple regulations and demands stemming from labour market policies.
The analysis suggests that these disempowering mechanisms are not unfortunate mistakes or side-effects of specific policies, but rather workings of a state-initiated production of austerity that push social service providers and employers to create work placements and activation courses with no or little prospect of securing paid or proper employment once completed. Therefore, the focus on ‘self-reliance’ that governs the production of this potentially exploitative work adds to the hyper-precarisation of everyday life, enhancing the physical and mental suffering of refugees.
Details
- Authors
- Ditte Shapiro, Rikke Egaa Jørgensen
- Geographic area
- Denmark
- Contributor type
- Academics and experts
- Original source
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