Working at the interstices of critical social policy, sociology and social movement studies, this article contributes to understanding the social impact of anti-migrant mobilisation. Research on anti-migrant activism has focused to date on the sociography, action repertoire, discursive strategies and propensity for political violence of anti-migrant actors. This article considers its impact on those working in public and third sector roles supporting people arriving and/or managing community tensions. It explores the case of Dover and surrounding area as a focal point of anti-migrant activism due to the arrival of refugees via ‘small boat crossings’. Employing a relational sociological approach, the article highlights the interactional dynamic between political discourse and policy designed to create a hostile immigration environment, the reaction-seeking tactics of anti-migrant activists and the responses of local authority, police and third sector actors delivering safeguarding and welfare services to those seeking asylum.

Despite the promise of the NHS being open to all, charging regulations and policy for non-UK citizens have been introduced. This article reports an analysis of policies and parliamentary debates linked to the UK's Immigration Health Surcharge. We use Bacchi's 'what's the problem represented to be' approach to understand how migrants and their healthcare access are represented and problematised within current health policy and related parliamentary debates. Core problem formulations relate to historic over-generosity of the NHS to migrants and overseas visitors; a lack of fairness in contributions to the NHS by British taxpayers compared to migrants; and a threat to the NHS's long-term sustainability due to migrants' and overseas visitors' misuse. This represents migrants as a financial drain on the NHS and, consequently, a risk to its continuation. Together, the problem formulations produce a justification and rationale for the Immigration Health Surcharge and its subsequent increases.

While worker cooperatives aim to achieve both solidaristic and social goals, there is less understanding of how the democratic structure of worker cooperatives interacts with an inclusive work environment among differently motivated and empowered workers. This study aims to fill this gap by exploring how democratic arrangements in the workplace contribute to the inclusion of marginalised workers through an analysis of Worker Co-ops in Japan—a network of worker cooperatives with roots in a job-creation movement by unemployed workers which has expanded in the realm of care. The study shows how Worker Co-ops have reinterpreted democracy as a cooperative practice of institutionalising the relational conditions for drawing out the perspectives of others and provides insights into how this also enables them collectively to resist dominant societal narratives that contribute to their marginalisation.

Consistent with its productivist welfare model, Hong Kong offers limited welfare support to asylum seekers and refugees (ASR). This study examines the living conditions, experiences, support systems and well-being of African ASRs in Hong Kong in the context of the city's productivist welfare regime. Semi-structured interviews with 53 African ASRs revealed that they faced economic precarity, social stigma, and social isolation, which culminated in distress and unhappiness. Due to challenges in meeting their basic needs, the ASRs turned to voluntary institutions (e.g., non-governmental organisations and religious groups) and informal welfare (e.g., private residents and families) for social, economic, cultural and symbolic capital. These capitals offered them tangible (food and clothing) and intangible (information, emotional support, prestige, and belief systems) resources to navigate harsh circumstances. The study argues that the well-being of African ASRs in Hong Kong hinges on the interplay between public and private welfare services. Such complementary support reflects the principles of the productivist welfare regime in Hong Kong and it is partly why the government is able to maintain low decommodification among ASRs. Therefore, protecting the well-being of ASRs within this framework requires a more integrated welfare programme that enables stronger cross-sectoral collaboration.

Taken together these essays reveal both synergies and contradictions between and within immigration and welfare policies. Several common themes emerge. Firstly, while access to the welfare state is an important signifier of membership, in practice claiming certain state benefits is accompanied by suspicion, surveillance and stigma. The good citizen is a worker citizen. Secondly, the importance of the welfare state in putting the nation into the nation-state: the normative national community imagined as the rightful subject of welfare states is racialised and classed. Thirdly, deservingness functions in both welfare states and immigration regimes to prioritise victimhood rather than rights and redistribution.

Banishment concludes the keyword discussion by arguing that we can understand the exclusionary practices of welfare states as a politics of destitution, which ultimately leads to the banishment of unwanted individuals. It argues that banishment can be helpful as a conceptual lens through which to understand the purposeful strategies that render individuals deportable, whether citizens or non-citizens.

The first keyword, Welfare State, sets out to problematise the term itself. The welfare state is a national construct, a ‘national social state’ as Etienne Balibar calls it. Thus, transnational or global migration is often construed as a disruptive force, potentially destabilising the welfare state and the nation. This keyword entry critically examines common conceptions of what the welfare state should provide. It delineates some of the ways that migrants (and, more broadly foreign nationals who are not themselves necessarily migrants) are excluded or partially included, with a focus on contemporary EU social policies.

In the benefits scandal, the Dutch state wrongfully accused at least 35,000 Dutch parents of young children of committing fraud with subsidies for childcare, based on ethnic profiling. Especially families with heritage in the former Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and Suriname were hit. Because they had to compensate for this supposed ‘fraud’, families were often thrown into severe debt and years of financial and legal struggle, a struggle that is ongoing for many. For the parents of more than 2,000 children, this even led to the loss of custody of their children. The Dutch state has formally acknowledged that ‘institutional racism’ was part of the problem, yet the scandal remains analysed by many, especially white scholars and journalists, as unintended, incidental and unrelated to Dutch colonial history. This commentary addresses the scandal as a case of an enduring colonial legacy of targeting racialised and gendered citizens in social policy. ‘Fraud’ is a social policy category through which this is made possible and violence continues to be inflicted upon racialised and gendered members of the Dutch population.

Within the space of a few years, eco-social policies evolved from being endorsed by a marginal community of heterodox scholars to being established in mainstream circles. While this is a welcome development, it also raises questions among critical social policy scholars. How should an emancipatory eco-social policy look? Rather than specifying concrete policies, this article contributes to answering this question by discussing the relationship between eco-social policies and capitalism. The discourse of 'sustainable welfare' tends to problematise growth rather than capitalism, risking a technocratic co-optation by neoliberal elites. Recent attempts to provide empirically applicable 'non-normative' definitions of eco-social policies risk weakening the critical potential of sustainable welfare ideas, de-politicising global capitalism with its inherent inequalities and unsustainability. I argue that critical scholars should embrace a democratic, feminist, and anti-racist/anti-colonial eco-socialism as the normative horizon of eco-social policies; discuss challenges related to the realisation of this ideal; and propose an agenda for critical eco-social policy research.