Illegal immigrants and welfare state provisions

The need to avoid contact with state officials and public organisations is a fact of life for illegal immigrants. After all, it is the state whose rules they are bending, skirting or violating. Yet there are instances in which even illegal immigrants may attempt to seek access to state provisions. This can be the case when certain needs, like education, housing and health care, cannot be served by immigrant networks or by employers. Secondly, it may be the case when they do not expect to be recognised as non-citizens. Welfare programmes are usually not explicitly designed with reference to illegal immigrants (Wenzel and Bös 1997: 546) and in a similar vein as police officers, gatekeepers of the welfare state may have room to manoeuvre. This proposition has also stimulated policymakers to focus on internal migration control and, in particular, to put more energy into excluding illegal immigrants from public services. The Linking Act is a case in point. The crux of this voluminous law, which passed both Houses of Parliament in 1998, is that entitlement of immigrants to a whole range of public and semi-public provisions such as social benefits, health care, housing and education, is systematically made conditional on their residence status.78 The Linking Act is often seen as a centrepiece in internal migration control in the Netherlands.

The key issue that will be addressed in the present chapter is to what extent the attempts to systematically exclude illegal immigrants from welfare provisions are effectuated in practice and with which consequences. Empirically, the chapter is based on ninety interviews with workers or professionals who are active in the sectors of social benefits, housing, health care and education within an urban setting (see appendix 4). The interviews were held roughly one year before and a little less than one year after the introduction of the Linking Act (1996/1997 and 1998/1999). Central questions in this chapter are: what happens when (semi-)professionals encounter illegal immigrants in practice? Are the immigrants excluded from services? Does this lead to dilemmas for the workers concerned? To what extent are decisions of policy implementers influenced by the new formal rules? Are these rules legalistically applied or are they transformed? Do practices vary between the different sectors or between individual workers and, if so, how can these differences be explained?