Welfare state bordering as a form of mobility and migration control

This article introduces this special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. In it, we present and discuss the concept of welfare state bordering. The notion of welfare state bordering that we develop refers to state-authorised practices of managing access to social rights based on residence, migrancy, and/or citizenship in a given socio-political order. These practices are in most cases implemented by national and local governments and institutions, but welfare state bordering can be implemented by various actors to whom the state has granted the power to manage access to rights, services and residence. We situate the notion of welfare state bordering in the scholarship on borders and bordering practices. We offer an overview of the four welfare state contexts discussed in this issue: the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Norway. We examine the ways in which various forms of welfare state bordering practices in these countries generate different configurations of exclusion and inclusion for both noncitizens and marginalised citizens on various inter-related levels of governance.