Producing Fraud at the Welfare‐Migration Nexus: Migrant Families and Children's Social Care

ABSTRACT

This article interrogates the production of ‘fraud’ at the interface between welfare and migration regimes. Taking the welfare micropublic of children's social care in the UK as a case study, we focus on encounters between migrant families subject to the ‘no recourse to public funds’ immigration condition and London local authorities. Through analysis of policy documents and ethnographic data, we trace the counter‐fraud turn within the local state in the 2010s. We argue that a shift away from ‘the child in need’ and towards destitution as the threshold for support saw children's rights legislation reinterpreted through the lens of ‘fraud’, implicitly racialising impoverished migrant children as undeserving of essential support. Paying close attention to questions of undeservingness, defined in part through attributions of fraud, we highlight the ways in which migrant parents are subject to suspicion by social services. We suggest that existing literature on the ‘problem’ of welfare fraud helps us to contextualise this shift but does not yet sufficiently address the production of fraud at the welfare‐migration nexus. Drawing on more contemporary ethnographic material, we show how the counter‐fraud turn has been deepened and expanded. We argue that extensive counter‐fraud practices have been developed through processes of discretion at the local level, producing and normalising major shifts in the enactment of policy that remain relatively hidden in the absence of more contextualised ethnographic research. Migrant families have thus been rendered ever‐suspicious, either gatekept from essential support due to their ‘fraudulence’ or subject to ongoing monitoring if they receive support, caught up in the impossible labour of disproving their own ‘fraudulence’. Finally, we show that counter‐fraud approaches arise from the interface between welfare and migration regimes in ways that bolster the logics of both immigration controls and welfare retrenchment, whilst amplifying the reach of the counter‐fraud turn.