Changing mandates: How welfare institutions respond to migration control

States regulate and control immigration not only at their borders, but also within and beyond their territories. Welfare provision is one site at which such ‘remote control’ (Zolberg 1999) happens. Yet, there are clear policy tensions between the inclusive aims of social policy and the exclusive goals of immigration policy, which raises questions as to how welfare actors and institutions respond to migration control tasks (Schweitzer 2019). Most research on migration control and social policy to date focuses on indirect control – e.g. how granting or not granting access to social support at the sub-national level can contradict or reinforce national restrictive policy goals – , much less research spells out the complex ways in which welfare institutions are directly involved in migration control by having to report irregularity to migration authorities and how they respond to these new mandates. This paper contributes to this debate by (i) mapping what reporting duties welfare institutions have; and (ii) exploring what institutional practices welfare institutions develop in response to such obligations, and what may explain responses. The paper draws on 61 interviews with different welfare institutions (including public and non-for profit, and different types of welfare bureaucracies) across four cities in Germany, as well as policy and legal document analysis. Our findings reveal extensive legal complexity, with widespread uncertainty amongst the implicated actors and frequent interpretation in line with actors’ own interests as a result. Whilst it is difficult to see clear patterns in responses between different types of welfare institutions, there are clear differences in responses between cities depending on the political climate. The paper concludes with a discussion on the potentials and limits of implementing border control through social policy.