This article investigates changes in the right to social assistance – a means-tested cash support programme, regulated by the Social Services Act – for irregularised migrants over a period of four decades, 1982–2022. The article makes the case that austerity policies have hollowed out the right to support, with significant repercussions for those with irregularised residency status. In doing so, it draws on a range of empirical data to shed light on the dynamics of legal change over time and across various settings, identifying both continuities and critical turning points. The latter include shifts in national or local migration policies, and novel intersections between migration law and social law, epitomised by court judgments that have redrawn the lines of inclusion and exclusion in the sphere of rights holders. The article also highlights continuous issues concerning inconsistencies in the legal sources made used of by courts, neglect of children’s interests and needs, and an application of requirements for participation in work-related activities that disadvantage migrants and citizens alike. Ultimately, the article offers insights into how social rights can be preserved in the context of increasingly restrictive migration and social policies.

Banishment concludes the keyword discussion by arguing that we can understand the exclusionary practices of welfare states as a politics of destitution, which ultimately leads to the banishment of unwanted individuals. It argues that banishment can be helpful as a conceptual lens through which to understand the purposeful strategies that render individuals deportable, whether citizens or non-citizens.

Local Migration Policy: Governance Structures and Policy Output in Swedish Municipalities by Gustav Lidén and Jon Nyhlén addresses the changing character of refugee settlement and integration policy in Swedish municipalities over a 10-year period, before and after the 2015 so-called ‘European migration crisis.’1 Theoretically grounded in the political science literature on central-local state relations, the monograph follows the ‘local turn’ in migration research. More specifically, it is framed as a study of migration policy dynamics following the implementation of the Swedish Settlement Act (SFS 2016: 38).

Under ett och ett halvt år beboddes Kvarteret Brännaren 19 i Norra Sorgenfri av en större grupp bostadslösa romer från Rumänien. Deras boplats – det så kallade Sorgenfrilägret – hamnade i centrum för en landsomfattande debatt om utsatta EU-medborgares bosättningar i Sverige och om det hot som en föreställt okontrollerad invandring antogs, och fortsatt antas, utgöra mot det svenska samhället och välfärdsstaten. I kapitlet redogör jag för händelserna kring Sorgenfrilägret och reflekterar över de symboliskt laddade föreställningar kring oordning och smuts som genomsyrade den allmänna debatten om utsatta EU-medborgare under mitten av 2010-talet. Jag beskriver hur Sorgenfrilägret (och i förlängningen också dess invånare) gjordes osanitär(a) och smutsig(a) genom att förvägras sophämtning, sanitära faciliteter och dricksvatten för att sedan avhysas på grund av att platsen ansågs just obeboelig. Jag visar också hur det offentliga hanterat Sorgenfrilägret och den förvisso komplicerade frågan om utsatta EU-medborgares närvaro på ett sätt som sammantaget kraftigt inskränkt gruppens tillgång till stadens rum. 

The first keyword, Welfare State, sets out to problematise the term itself. The welfare state is a national construct, a ‘national social state’ as Etienne Balibar calls it. Thus, transnational or global migration is often construed as a disruptive force, potentially destabilising the welfare state and the nation. This keyword entry critically examines common conceptions of what the welfare state should provide. It delineates some of the ways that migrants (and, more broadly foreign nationals who are not themselves necessarily migrants) are excluded or partially included, with a focus on contemporary EU social policies.

This is a conversation between Irina Zamfirescu (University of Bucharest, Romania) and Maria Persdotter (Linköping University, Sweden) that focuses on the contemporary migrations of Roma from Romania to Sweden and other wealthy EU states, and which seeks to contextualize these migrations with regards to the current housing situation and ongoing dispossession of Roma in Romania. The conversation was recorded in September 2022 and has been transcribed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Under det senaste decenniet har idéburna offentliga partnerskap (IOP) – ett ramverk för samverkan mellan kommuner och idéburna organisationer – blivit ett allt vanligare sätt att tillhandahålla välfärdsinsatser. Ett område där samverkansformen användes tidigt var i arbetet med så kallade utsatta EU/EESmedborgare. Här har IOP inneburit en tredje väg mellan en generös respektive restriktiv tolkning av målgruppens rättigheter. Syftet med denna artikel är att genom djupintervjuer med representanter för idéburna organisationer belysa ett fält av problematiker som uppstår genom lokala IOP. Artikeln bygger på fallbeskrivningar av IOP i tre kommuner – Göteborg, Lund och Malmö. Utifrån dessa argumenterar vi för att ramverket medför en påtaglig volatilitet som påverkar den idéburna partens handlingsutrymme: IOP-formen etablerar en oförmedlad konjunkturkänslighet för socialt arbete som är direkt beroende av lokala maktförhållanden och händelseutvecklingar.

Over the last decade, IOPs – a framework for collaboration between municipalities and NGOs – have become a common way of organizing certain welfare services. One area where this institutional arrangement was used early on was in relation to EU/EEA citizens without right of residence. Here, IOPs have provided a “third-way” between a generous and restrictive interpretation of the target group’s social rights. The purpose of this article is to highlight, through interviews with representatives of NGOs, a field of problems related to IOPs. The article is based on case descriptions of IOPs in three municipalities - Gothenburg, Lund and Malmö. Based on these, we argue that IOPs entail a significant volatility in that IOP form establishes a precarious institutional status for certain forms of social work, making these increasingly dependent on local power relations and developments.

This chapter considers the interface of human rights and ‘urban law’,such as environmental nuisance and public order law. It revolves around a set of cases concerning a community of some two-hundred Romanian Roma ‘EU migrant’ squatters in Malmö, Sweden, and builds on our first hand experiences as members of a street-law collective, the Centre for Social Rights (henceforth, the Centre).1Between 2015 and 2017, we par-ticipated in organising efforts to promote the interests and social rights of the Roma community in question. We also represented them in a number of legal cases against the City of Malmö and the local police authorities. In this chapter, we focus on our efforts to prevent the squatter community from being evicted from an unauthorised settlement – the Sorgenfri Camp – without a viable resettlement plan. We account for our experiences of attempting to mobilise a human and minority rights dis- course and invoke the case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), and discuss why this approach was eventually unsuccess- ful. This book chapter is an attempt to summarise our experience and analyse it with the benefit of hindsight as well as a greater theoretical understanding of the processes that we were a part of in 2015.

EU legal geography concerns itself with the mutually constitutive relationship between EU law and space (also, and increasingly so, time). This requires reconstructing and systematizing the widely used concepts which reveal the geographical basis of EU law (such as movement and circulation), but also developing a particular viewpoint, indeed a specific “ethos of investigation”, which equips us with the tools to challenge and transcend the dominant ways of doing EU law. In particular, it is argued that a geographic turn in European legal studies will foster the study of how law works “on the ground” and will allow challenging taken-for-granted ideas about the relationship between law and political order, while throwing new light on the very technical concepts with which we reconstruct, analyse and assess EU law.