Premières lignes de l’introduction
This themed section explores the role of ideas about deservingness in shaping migrants’ access to social services from a European comparative perspective. The collection of articles qualitatively uncovers the sorts of criteria and ideas that are mobilised to enable or restrict access to basic social services, contributing to migrants’ ability to participate meaningfully in society. To that end, we connect two fields of enquiry : namely, migration control and social policy. Contributing to the literature on the ‘migration control-social policy nexus’ (Ataç and Rosenberger, 2018), the novelty of this collection lies in the comparative analysis of notions of deservingness within internal bordering practices. Seven articles by political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and scholars of law scrutinise the manifestations of ideas about deservingness from street-level interactions to judicial proceedings, in three key social service sectors : namely, healthcare, housing, and labour market integration in France, Germany, Greece, Italy and the Netherlands. Uneven access to public services or to the local labour market function as internal border control (Bommes and Geddes, 2000 ; Van Der Leun, 2006), engendering differential inclusion of migrants (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013), who are incorporated into certain areas of society but denied admission into others. As Hall (2017) contended in his more theoretical considerations, migrants are subject to complex bureaucratic procedures which regulate not only who is coming in, but who can afford to stay. [Lire la suite]

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