So far I have set out the theme of "cancellations" and the resulting problems and fears that affected many of my informants in receipt of welfare payments. I have located these experiences within the wider context of current UK welfare reforms and indicated that they are not restricted to my research participants but are likely to be more commonly found. Likewise, on the theoretical plane, Wacquant's account of the ascent of the punitive state mentions 'immigrants' only in passing but does not analytically distinguish them from other groups within the broader category of urban poor such as the working poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the destitute. In the subsequent sections, I will focus on what is specific to the migrants who participated in my research and thus extend Wacquant's argument to suggest that my informants' encounters with social welfare providers can be interpreted not only as part of state-making but also, more specifically, as constitutive of nation-building processes. To set out my argument, I will begin by introducing further instances of everyday state- making from my data as they particularly relate to migrants in my field, namely the practice of
113 In 2013, Prime Minister David Cameron spoke about the government's aim to build "a leaner, more efficient
state" on a permanent basis, pointing to "practical", economic reasons such as the budget deficit and "out-of- control" debts for pursuing such policy (Watt 2013, unpaginated).
114
Discourses around 'benefit scroungers' and skivers', have become commonplace, as hardly a day goes by without benefit recipients being 'targeted' by the media and politicians. 'Welfare claimant' itself has become a stigmatised category, rendering somehow obscene the idea of people relying on the state for support (Baumberg et al. 2012). The controversial documentary series Benefit Street (broadcast in January 2014) on Channel 4, an independent UK television broadcaster, illustrates the extent of such stigmatisation; not only are those in receipt of welfare support targeted and demonised as 'scroungers', but their situation has also become a topic for consumption: televised 'entertainment' for the public.
document retention by welfare authorities as well as face-to-face encounters with state agents at a local Job Centre in Glasgow.
6.3.1 'Documentless' citizens
Perhaps the most striking example of what was experienced as the arbitrary administration of the welfare system was the retention of identity documents such as passports, birth certificates and ID cards by the welfare authorities. As well as a completed application form for certain benefits, presenting personal identification documents to the authorities was often a part of the bureaucratic procedure that applicants had to undergo in order to have their entitlement to welfare benefits assessed. As I found during my fieldwork, applications were sometimes "cancelled" based on doubts raised by the relevant welfare authorities about the 'genuineness' of documents provided to them. On one occasion, for example, Viktor Hnilica, a 40-year old Slovak man came to Groundworks for advice on how to retrieve his Slovak ID card which – to his bewilderment - had been kept by an advisor at the Job Centre. Mr Hnilica had attended a routine appointment in relation to his unemployment assistance only to have his ID card retained by the Job Centre staff. The Nosáks, a middle-aged Czech couple, had also been affected by this practice. The couple’s residence cards were held for eight months by the local Job Centre on suspicion that they were "not genuine" even though these had been issued by the UK Border Agency.
Mrs Nosáková: I had a residence card. The Scottish [authorities] did not believe it, they said it is false, invalid. Then I said to them: "Why has Liverpool [the UKBA] issued it? Why did I wait for it for half a year? Why did I send my passport there?" […] The Job Centre told us that we are not entitled to money [Jobseekers’ Allowance].
Mr Nosák: You know what the worst thing was… when we were not entitled to the money [JSA], and we were deleted from the Job Centre [system], we did not receive a penny. For eight months in a row, we went through the streets gathering scrap metal, so we could buy gas and so that my wife and I could feed ourselves. And guess how much debt I've accumulated? It was outrageous! And just because of stupid authorities.
Mr Nosák: So many papers, I'd have liked to show it to you. Such a huge amount of documentation for both of us. Descriptions of why and everything. I wanted to tell this to the news… when we won the case, so that the people realized then that we were entitled to it. And what did we endure? It was awful.
This extract from a transcribed conversation with the Nosáks illustrates vividly the impact of a "cancellation" that was based on unfounded suspicions regarding their identification documents and conveys a sense of the stress and hardship the couple went through when they were left without state support for eight months. Despite longstanding efforts by their local law centre to recover these documents and urge the Job Centre to resume the processing of their claim, it was only after the intervention of a local MP that the residence cards and, eventually, the benefit payments were released.
The support workers at Groundworks confirmed that document retention was a rather frequent occurrence and happened to many people who attended the advice service. The extent of these practices was also documented and criticised in an earlier report (December 2011) conducted by a community controlled law centre based in the south of Glasgow (Paterson et al. 2011).115 The report stated that the "retention of passports [was] commonplace" (p. 6) and highlighted the unreasonable amount of time (in some cases up to two years) that the authorities held these documents without any progress in the assessment of individuals' claims. When documents were returned to the claimants, the report further pointed out, there was "no covering letter or explanation" (p. 16) provided by the authorities as to why this had happened.
The retention of identity documents by the authorities, however, did not only mean the "cancellation" of one's benefits; it also left affected migrants without personal documents - in some cases for longer periods of time - and thus unable to access other public services or travel abroad. One Slovak woman, for example, told me about the difficulties she experienced enrolling her 14 year-old daughter at the local school because their passports were being held by HMRC for several months. Also, being abroad meant for those concerned that obtaining a replacement for their passports or IDs was expensive and not a straightforward matter. UK
115Although Paterson et al.'s report focused on Roma migrants only, as I have discussed here, document retention
extended also to non-Roma individuals. (A more detailed summary of this report can also be found in chapter 1, section 1.1.4.)
authorities would forward 'suspect' documents to the Slovak or Czech embassy in London, which would then send all documents to the Ministry of the Interior in Slovakia or Czech Republic as a matter of procedure. The support workers at Groundworks routinely enquired about ID replacements with both embassies in London, which were, as one of the workers put it, "inundated with valid IDs and passports" that the UK authorities had doubted. The extent of this practice was briefly covered in the Slovak media. In August 2012, a Slovak TV correspondent reported that the Slovak Embassy in London had received as many as 385 passports and 1005 birth certificates by the UK welfare authorities within a week.116 In order
to retrieve their IDs or passports, affected individuals in Glasgow had to first attend their embassy in London to obtain a temporary travel document, which would then enable them to travel to Slovakia or the Czech Republic and get it back from the relevant authorities there. Some, however, could not afford to travel to London, let alone further to Slovakia or the Czech Republic. In these cases, people were left in limbo, hoping that one day their documents would be returned to them by the British welfare authorities or that they would save enough money to afford the journey to London or further afield.
These practices and processes through which these migrants are dispossessed of their official identification documents give rise to what I have termed 'documentless citizens'. As noted earlier, in the UK, Slovak and Czech nationals, on paper, became entitled to the same welfare benefits on a par with UK nationals on the basis of their EU citizenship once the temporary restrictions were lifted in 2011. While EU citizenship does not substitute for national citizenship, it is directly conferred on every person holding nationality of an EU country by the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU which also enshrines a prohibition of discrimination based on nationality (European Commission 2012). The above experiences of document retention that emerged during my fieldwork in 2012 shine a light on how, in practice and at a relatively early stage after the restrictions expired, these migrants' entitlements to welfare benefits were variously implemented and sometimes, in effect, denied. In this sense, I employ
116
This short televised news clip titled Shame for Slovaks - non-existing children were added on passports suggested in a scandalising narrative that Slovak nationals living in the UK were getting non-existing children registered on their passports. The programme had racist undertones in that it seemed to imply, through the references to specific regions in the east of the country, that it was Slovakian Roma who were 'bringing shame on the nation'. While the programme, however, did not provide any evidence of any wrongdoing, it included a brief reference about the numbers of identification documents received by the embassy in London (Televízia JOJ 2012b).
the term of 'documentless citizen' to refer to a seemingly paradoxical category of citizens who are dispossessed of their official identification documents and thus become 'documentless' with adverse consequences. This notion intentionally contrasts with the term 'undocumented migrant' which is often used with reference to persons who have no (longer a) legal right to be in a specific country. Differently from the latter, Slovak and Czech nationals living in Glasgow are de jure granted privileged access to state provided welfare in Britain but in some cases find these rights being de facto nullified or inaccessible for sustained periods of time. The making of documentless citizens, however, does not only entail the retention of people's documents and, with it, the hindrance of their access to welfare and other state services or the impediment of their movement across national borders, but it can also be read as a practice of statecraft. The important role of identification documents in relation to state formation has been highlighted by various scholars who have argued that routine bureaucratic procedures such as issuing passports or IDs for the (national) population or checking the validity of documents of foreign nationals at the border or within the country at immigration offices, are central to the functioning of the state (Torpey 2000; Hansen & Stepputat 2001; Kelly 2006; Navaro-Yashin 2007; Hull 2012). Through these kind of mundane and ordinary practices the state maintains its monopoly over controlling the movement of people across its borders and reproduces its legitimacy, affecting how it "comes to be imagined, encountered, and re- imagined by the population" (Sharma & Gupta 2006, p. 12). However, more specifically, with regard to the area of welfare provision I argue that the practice of document retention that some of my informants experienced is not only a mode of statecraft but also of nation-building. While the nowadays extensive requirements for providing documentary evidence to welfare authorities that Mr Nosák, for example, spoke about above already indicate the intricate control mechanisms employed by the state vis-à-vis all welfare applicants, the retention of documents illustrates a specific form of state intervention in ordinary people's lives which I assume to be particular to Czech and Slovak migrants (and perhaps nationals from the other A8 countries) in the UK.
With regard to the welfare system, decisions on individuals' benefit applications rest, inter
alia, on their nationalities as attested and materially represented in their official identification documents. The welfare system is both a highly contested and changing field and a means
through which the state "control[s] the entrance doors to the national home of solidarity" (Wimmer 2002, p. 251), i.e. it defines the criteria for membership to the national community. Regulating access to welfare provision effects boundaries between members and non-members and thus constructs who is and who is not deserving of state care. This point is currently rather apparent with regard to persons who have come to the UK from outside the EEA countries; legally, they have no recourse to public funds such as support provided by the welfare state. For these people 'the door is shut' and can only be opened by gaining a legal status that allows them access such as through naturalisation. In contrast, as mentioned above, due to their status as EU citizens Czech and Slovak migrants in the UK enjoy, in theory, the "same rights and obligations" (European Commission 2013, unpaginated) as British citizens. While this does not mean that the former have unrestricted access to welfare support, as some restrictions, mainly in form of residency requirements still apply, overall, EU citizenship aims at 'opening the entrance doors' to the British national community for EU nationals in the UK. The ongoing, highly controversial public and political debate about EU citizens' rights to welfare in the UK already reminds us of the fragile nature of such political promises of belonging. However, I argue, it is fruitful to look beyond the level of policy or regulation but examine the actual workings of the state as it takes place in the myriad of welfare offices around the country and through the various interactions with state agents at different levels. From such a vantage point of the specific and concrete settings and encounters with the welfare state, the experiences of document retention and its consequences that I focus on here can then be understood as calling into question or highlighting the limits of EU citizenship in Glasgow (and perhaps elsewhere) for those affected by these practices. Having one's identification documents taken away for prolonged periods of time, often without any explanation given other than that the validity of the documents was doubted, openly signals that one's membership to the national community is being challenged. Such practices split the 'us' projected in the shared notion of EU citizenship into an 'us', the British, and a 'suspect you', the other. In some ways, for Slovak and Czech citizens who enjoy freedom of movement under EU rules, the drama of the passport control at the border has been moved into the seemingly ordinary offices of welfare authorities which are increasingly taking on immigration-related roles (often without the relevant expertise). As much as through national and supranational citizenship rules, integration policy, or public discourses on Britishness, it is in those offices
that membership criteria are concretely enacted, boundaries redrawn and nation-building takes place. Rather than being able to rely on a safety net provided by the state, my informants displayed a general sense of being mistrusted and felt their entitlement as well as their sincerity being questioned by the British welfare authorities (or particular officials). Often, these feelings were framed as issues of injustice, or in Mr Nosák's words, 'people not realising that we were entitled to it'.
6.3.2 "Ideme na policiu" ("We're going to the police")
In the previous section I discussed how particular bureaucratic practices that my research participants experienced in relation to welfare authorities are implicated in processes of nation-building. Here, I focus on face-to-face encounters between Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants and state agents by providing a more detailed account of their interaction at a local Job Centre. Alongside HMRC, the Job Centre was the other main authority that informants mentioned in relation to their benefit "cancellations". Most communication with HMRC, or "Revenue" as informants called it, was carried out on the phone or in writing, and some informants had difficulties coming to terms with a service that lacked a reference point or building where one could go and talk to someone directly, unlike in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. On the other hand, the services offered by Job Centres to those looking for work were available face-to-face and locally. But while Job Centres were approachable and perhaps provided the more 'conventional' type of state support that Czech- and Slovak-speaking migrants in Glasgow may have been familiar with, in practice these were also places that generated a great deal of anxiety and stress for some migrants. As I mentioned earlier, several individuals had their payments suspended or stopped, or their documents retained by the Job Centre, while various others spoke repeatedly about "bad stories" and the "awful treatment" that they had received, especially at one of the local Job Centres that was located a short walk from the Groundworks service in the south of Glasgow.
I witnessed some of these events first hand when I accompanied one of the informants, Martina Tŕpková, a 50-year old woman from a town in eastern Slovakia, to her scheduled appointments at this particular Job Centre (May/June 2012). I had come to know Mrs Tŕpková
at Groundworks, which she regularly attended for help, and she was one of those who had repeatedly complained about difficulties when attending the Job Centre. She had only recently arrived in Glasgow (2010) and spoke little English, so Mrs Tŕpková was particularly grateful when I offered to interpret for her during her appointments. Often, she explained, her 15-year old daughter would accompany her when attending the Job Centre, which meant that the daughter would miss school as a result of her mother’s (fortnightly) appointments. I met Mrs Tŕpková in front of the Job Centre as usual. This time she was waiting outside the building together with her friend, a Slovak woman who looked of a similar age to Mrs Tŕpková. Their appointments with the employment adviser were scheduled at the same time, and as they lived in the same area, they often walked together to the Centre. As we entered the building, Mrs Tŕpková showed her appointment card to the security guard who asked her to wait in the waiting area until her name was called by an advisor. I explained that I was there to interpret for Mrs Tŕpková, as she spoke little English. Approving my request, the security guard asked us to make our way to the waiting area. In the waiting area, Mrs Tŕpková kept scanning the various advisers' desks in the open-plan office and began to quietly 'prepare herself'. She tried to anticipate which adviser would be calling her. "That man sitting over there, he is nice (on je
dobry)", she observed, hoping that he would "take" (brať) her again. "The blonde woman over here", she continued, "is also nice - she has taken me before". "That woman to the right," she