Human Rights Lunch Online: The right to give rights - Welfare professionals as guardians of undocumented migrants’ human rights

Jacob Lind is a researcher at the Depart of Global Political Studies and the Malmö Institute for Migration Studies (MIM) at Malmö University. He has recently been awarded an ERC-starting grant. At this digital lunch seminar he will present his ERC-project GIVE RIGHTS, on how professionals in healthcare, education and social services approach the requirement to report undocumented migrants.

Undocumented migrants’ rights are under pressure in Europe today and migration control is increasingly deputized across different societal actors. Several decades ago, Hannah Arendt pointed out that universalistic understandings of human rights have little to offer noncitizens. Inspired by her, researchers have suggested that the foundation for undocumented migrants’ human rights instead can be found in the right-claims and contestations of migrants themselves. However, little attention has been paid to the role of welfare professionals in these processes.

 Across Europe, welfare professionals have resisted proposals that they should have a duty to report undocumented migrants to the police. This has been pivotal for protecting migrants’ rights. Consequently, GIVE RIGHTS will develop new conceptual tools for an interdisciplinary understanding of undocumented migrants’ rights as rooted in an interplay between migrants’ rights-claims and welfare professionals’ attitudes, practices, and collective contestations – highlighting the underexamined relational character of rights. The project investigates the politics of undocumented migrants’ rights as an interplay between different actors with converging interests: Undocumented migrants want access to their human rights – in Arendt’s words they want to have a “right to have rights” – and welfare professionals do not want to act as extended border guards but have a “right to GIVE RIGHTS”.

 GIVE RIGHTS will compare Italy, the Netherlands, Sweden and the UK where the protection of undocumented migrants’ access to rights are, or have recently been, undergoing intense negotiations. Through its novel theoretical framework and by innovatively combining survey data with policy mapping, qualitative media analysis, participant observation, focus groups and expert interviews, GIVE RIGHTS provides a new research agenda for theoretical and political debates on the future of human rights in Europe.