Learn More

Eve Dickson and Rachel Rosen (2021)  “Punishing Those Who Do the Wrong Thing”: Enforcing Destitution and Debt through the UK’s Family Migration Rules. Critical Social Policy, 41(4): 545–565.

Abstract: In 2012, the ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition was extended to long-standing migrant families in the UK who had previously achieved rights to residence and welfare through human rights mechanisms. Through close examination of policy, political statements, and media coverage, we make the case that the NRPF extension was – and continues to be – intentionally subjugating and punitive, most aptly understood as a policy of enforced destitution and debt imposed on negatively-racialised post-colonial subjects. In drawing out the implications of our argument, we point to time, destitution, and debt as core technologies of the UK’s migration regime, alongside everyday bordering, detention, and deportability. Denying support through NRPF serves to exclude putatively included migrants while normalising conditional approaches to social support. Our article reveals why moral arguments against NRPF based on destitution fail and suggests that challenging welfare bordering requires a more systemic appraisal of policy frames, intentions and effects.

Rosen R, Crafter S and Meetoo V (2021) An absent presence: separated child migrants’ caring practices and the fortified neoliberal state. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 47(7): 1649-1666.

Abstract: This paper explores the ambivalent positioning of separated child migrants in the UK with a focus on the care that they provide for each other. Drawing on interview data with state and non-state adult stakeholders involved in the immigration-welfare nexus, we consider how children’s care practices are viewed and represented. We argue that separated children’s caring practices assume an absent presence in the discourses mobilised by these actors: either difficult to articulate or represented in negative and morally-laden terms, reflective of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’ towards migrants and advanced capitalist constructions of childhood. Such an examination sheds light on the complex state attempts to manage the care and migration regimes, and the way that care can serve as a way of making and marking inclusions and exclusions. Here we emphasise the political consequences for separated child migrants in an age of neoliberal state retrenchment from public provision of care and rising xenophobic nationalism.

Abstract: Processes for assessing the age of young unaccompanied migrants have been roundly critiqued, with new concerns in the UK being raised about the increasing use of ‘scientific’ approaches. In this article, we suggest that, taking everything into account, analyses do not go far enough, arguing that technical questions of how ‘best’ to assess age or the new incursion of biometric measurements can obscure the political question of what work age does in hostile border regimes. As a result, the underpinning logics of age assessment – an essentialisation of age, ‘race’ and borders – are not only left in place but further augmented. We demonstrate, through a careful curation of assessment reports (that operate through the assertion of truth claims about the body, childhood and time) how such reports draw on and reproduce multiple and intersecting racist imaginaries as they are synthesised with developmental logics around childhood. Age, we argue, is being weaponised in the service of post-racial fantasies in liberal democracies, rising ethnonationalism and state retrenchment from social support.

Rosen, Rachel and Eve Dickson (2022). (En)Countering raceless narratives: Migrant mothers and children with ‘no recourse to public funds’. BSA Virtual Annual Conference 2022: Building Equality and Justice Now, online 21 April 2022.

Abstract: In the UK, the ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition borders social support for undocumented migrants and those with time-limited leave to remain. Previous research has highlighted NRPF’s detrimental impacts, particularly on single-parent families headed by mothers from former British colonies, who are racialised as ‘Other’ and already economically marginalised.

Drawing on an ethnographic study with such mothers and their children, we consider the ways that ‘race’ and racism appeared in our interlocutors’ narratives. We demonstrate that suffering was articulated most profoundly, and made sense of, largely through ‘de-raced’ interpersonal encounters. Where ‘race’ did appear explicitly, it referred to micro-level aggressions by intimate others, usually other people of colour, or in abstract terms of ‘good’ Whiteness. What’s more, in much of the scant scholarship on NRPF, we find a striking absence of ‘race’, with systemic racism rarely granted explanatory purchase. Speaking against such erasures, we argue for the importance of listening to silences to address the ways that racism pervades Britain’s internal and external borders. In asking what we can learn from its presence and absence, we offer three tentative ways of making sense of the spectre of ‘race’/racism: (1) The overdetermined Whiteness of the research encounter. (2) A context where post-racial fantasies dominate state discourses and individualised neoliberal subjectivities prevail. (3) The often faceless and fleeting nature of encounters between families with NRPF and the state, which mean that systemic racism is obscured by hyper-violent interpersonal acts and the daily challenges of sustaining life under duress.

The ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition, which is imposed on people ‘subject to immigration control’, forms a key part of the UK’s punitive migration regime, bordering access to social support for migrants who need it. One example, and this talk’s focus, is the denial of free school meals (FSM) to children in families with NRPF, some of the most destitute in Britain. This has long been a concern for migrants’ rights groups and families navigating everyday borders in the UK. Recent campaigns and threats of legal action have resulted in some children affected by NRPF becoming temporarily eligible for FSM during the pandemic, but campaigns for access have continued due to ongoing problems with the policy. This talk explores the imaginaries of childhood, poverty and nation which shape such policies and offers a warning that, without reflecting on and even challenging these imaginaries, campaigns can end up justifying exclusions of some migrant families at the very same time that they aim for more expansive support. We argue that how campaigns represent their causes – which, in the case of FSM, is often through the exceptionalism and therefore hyper-deservingness of childhood and a focus on the extraordinary circumstances of Covid – has implications. These representations, we suggest, can ultimately end up narrowing political imaginaries and reducing discussion to technical questions about who is ‘deserving’, and, in the process, risk shoring up an exclusionary, nativist and hostile state.

Dickson, Eve and Rosen, Rosen (2021). New Imaginaries for Countering Welfare Bordering: A Case Study of Enforced Destitution and Debt in the UK’s Family Migration Rules. Sociological Knowledges for Alternative Futures, 15th ESA Conference. Online, 1st September 2021.

In 2012, the ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) condition was extended to long-standing migrant families in the UK who had previously achieved rights to residence and welfare through human rights mechanisms. Through close examination of policy, political statements, and media coverage, we make the case that the NRPF extension was – and continues to be – intentionally subjugating and punitive, most aptly understood as a policy of enforced destitution and debt imposed on negatively-racialised post-colonial subjects. In drawing out the implications of our argument, we point to time, destitution, and debt as core technologies of the UK’s migration regime, alongside everyday bordering, detention, and deportability. Denying support through NRPF serves to exclude putatively included migrants while normalising conditional approaches to social support. Our paper reveals why moral arguments against NRPF based on destitution fail. In response, we argue that challenging welfare bordering requires a more systemic appraisal of policy frames, intentions and effects, and the development of alternate imaginaries of solidarity and belonging.

Rosen, Rachel and Eve Dickson (2021). Social reproduction in the shadows: Migrant mothers and children with “no recourse to public funds”. Special panel: Breaking the Borders of Home: Transformations of Care and Reproductive Work at Borders, borderlands and bordering: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference 2021. London/zoom, 1st September 2021.

In the United Kingdom (UK), migrants ‘subject to immigration control’ are not allowed to access most welfare benefits or social housing. This policy was officially incorporated into the Asylum and Immigration Act 1996 under the moniker ‘no recourse to public funds (NRPF)’. Since July 2012, in the context of the state’s publicly proclaimed ‘hostile environment’ towards people on the move, the use of the NRPF condition has been extended to long-resident families with legally recognized, but temporary, immigration status, as well as undocumented migrants. Drawing on data from a ‘day in the life’ ethnographic study with single mothers with NRPF and their children, in this paper we argue that NRPF can be understood as a form of “organized state abandonment” (Gilmore 2007). By denying these mothers and children support and benefits necessary for their survival, the effects of British state policy are enforced debt and destitution for working class families with origins in Britain’s erstwhile colonial empire. In this paper, we explore the implications for social reproductive labour, pointing to the ways that such abandonment forsakes migrant mothers and children, leaving them to sustain themselves in the shadows of the austere state.  This produces the conditions of super-exploitability in care and provisioning and deepens the material and ideological stratification of social reproductive labour through the production of (formally included) surplus populations.

Eve Dickson (2024). A rule without a purpose? Looking historically at the ‘no recourse to public funds’ immigration policy. Oxford: COMPAS Seminar series Migrants’ Access to the Welfare State, 7^th March 2024.

In recent years, we have witnessed rising interest in the welfare-migration nexus in Britain, most notably in the ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) immigration condition, which briefly entered the public domain when former Prime Minister Boris Johnson revealed his surprise at the policy’s existence during the Covid-19 pandemic. Research and advocacy link the widespread use of NRPF to either the Immigration and Asylum Act 1999, which contains the current iteration of the rule, or the emergence of the UK’s self-proclaimed ‘hostile’ immigration environment in 2012. This risks presentism and methodological nationalism by obscuring NRPF’s longer history and the colonial roots of European welfare states. Drawing on early-stage research as part of the Social Reproduction in the Shadows: Making Lives with No Recourse to Public Funds project, this talk explores some central aspects of the history of the NRPF policy and its contestation to better understanding how and why the policy has changed over time and to what effect.

Report by Eve Dickson and Rachel Rosen, June 2023 (London: Solidarities Project, UCL).

POLICY BRIEFING: Section 17 support for families with ‘no recourse to public funds’ (NRPF) in London.

Read full report.

Rachel Benchekroun, Eve Dickson and Rachel Rosen, 14 September 2022 (University College London)

Written evidence to the Justice and Home Affairs Committee Call for Evidence on Family migration.

Read document here.