*Article* **The Exceptional Becomes Everyday: Border Control, Attrition and Exclusion from Within**

**Regina C. Serpa**

> Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling, Stirling FK8 4LA, UK; r.c.serpa@stir.ac.uk

**Abstract:** This article examines processes of migration and border control, illustrating the ways by which everyday housing and welfare services function as mechanisms of exclusion in both direct and indirect ways. Using the thesis of crimmigration, the article demonstrates how border controls have become deeply implicated in systems claiming to offer welfare support—and how a global public health emergency has intensified exclusionary processes and normalised restrictive practices. The article compares border controls in two localities—under the UK government's coercive 'hostile environment' policies (based on technologies of surveillance) and a more indirect 'programme of discouragement' in The Netherlands (based on technologies of attrition). The study demonstrates the role of contemporary welfare states in entrenching inequality and social exclusion (from within), arguing that the exceptional circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have facilitated the differential everyday treatment of migrants, revealing a hierarchy of human worth through strategies of surveillance and attrition.

**Keywords:** COVID-19; welfare; crimmigration; exclusion; surveillance; attrition

**Citation:** Serpa, Regina C.. 2021. The Exceptional Becomes Everyday: Border Control, Attrition and Exclusion from Within. *Social Sciences* 10: 329. https://doi.org/10.3390/ socsci10090329

Academic Editor: Robert Koulish

Received: 11 July 2021 Accepted: 3 September 2021 Published: 4 September 2021

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2021 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

### **1. Introduction: Bordering Practices in the Contemporary Welfare State**

A succession of 'crises' observed in the 21st century—including the rise of terrorism, and more recently, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—have reinforced the role of borders as defensive barriers against undesirable influences and external threats, helping to construct the contemporary 'problem' of migration (De Genova and Tazzioli 2016). Ostensibly intended to protect national security and promote peace, freedom and prosperity, physical boundaries have served to strengthen societal divisions through intensifying 'paradigmatic borders'—between inside and outside, citizen and noncitizen—in law, public discourse and everyday human interaction (Krasmann 2007; Paasi 2009). Revealed within these societal divisions is a hierarchy of human worth, maintained by the expanding application of state technologies of control, categorisation, surveillance and punishment in migration governance which regards foreigners or noncitizens as suspect persons, and as such, they are assigned a dual identity of 'criminal' and 'migrant' combined: 'the crimmigrant' (Aas 2013, p. 331). Whilst there is no causal link between crime and migration control, a process of 'crimmigration' (Stumpf 2006) has facilitated a new 'state of exception'— where perceived threats to national security and law and order provide the rationale for creating extraordinary measures (Agamben 2005). In the context of support services, such exclusionary practices have been termed 'welfare penalism' and described as a form of 'benevolent violence' (Barker 2012). This article examines how housing and welfare services have become increasingly implicated in decisions relating to border control and national security and how the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the bordering practices that operateineverydayservices(Paasi2009)toincorporatepracticesofexclusionfromwithin.

This article is structured as follows: first, the methods are outlined in order to demonstrate the development of crimmigration control, in order to provide the theoretical framing of the research, with a focus on the exceptional and everyday, to analyse the role of the state and civil society in migration securitisation and bordered penality. The article examines how migration governance extends into the contemporary welfare state, through

the deployment of technologies of surveillance and attrition. These technologies can be clearly witnessed in the examples of direct and indirect forms of coercion in the UK and The Netherlands, respectively, illustrating the nexus between crimmigration and the use of welfare as a border policing tool. The global pandemic has increased dependency and vulnerability—intensified by processes of attrition (through welfare entitlement) and exclusion from within (via surveillance)—throwing into sharp relief the differential treatment of noncitizens and revealing a hierarchy of human worth.
