Outsourcing Immigration Control: Why Welfare Regimes?

Immigration controls in the West increasingly involve “outsourcing” – placing duties upon actors outside of dedicated immigration control systems to monitor compliance with immigration laws. While outsourcing efforts often involve private actors (landlords, banks, employers), they also involve other parts of the state that do not deal fundamentally with immigration – most conspicuously, welfare regimes. Amid many possibilities for outsourcing immigration enforcement, what explains why welfare regimes are so often chosen as a sector to which to “outsource” immigration control? This paper employs semi-structured interviews with policymakers to examine three European cases in the 1990s – the UK, France, and Germany – when increased migrant inflows led to a number of policy changes which increasingly made welfare regimes sites of outsourcing. In the UK, policymakers resorted to housing and benefits regimes try to reduce asylum-seeker inflows; in France, irregular migrants were excluded from the general healthcare system at the beginning of the 1990s; in Germany, asylum seekers’ access to social benefits and social housing was increasingly restricted. Examining the different dynamics of outsourcing in these three cases helps to explain why, amid the pressures on welfare regimes to adapt to increasing mobility, policy often pushes them in the opposite direction: to control increasing mobility.