(The Home Office 2021)

The severity of the rhetoric towards migrants used by Patel and other would-be enthusiastic crimmigration advocates is mirrored in policy. Responses to COVID-19 have resulted in further mechanisms of social exclusion for migrant groups, revealing differential treatment of noncitizens, reflective of a neocolonial logic constituted by a hierarchy of human worth (Mayblin et al. 2020). On 23rd of March 2020, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson mandated what he described as the 'very draconian measure' of stopping all 'non-essential contact' with others and putting the country into 'lockdown', telling people in a televised statement they 'must' stay at home (UK Government 2020). Three days later, the UK Government implemented the 'Everyone In' policy and instructed local authorities to invest resources in providing accommodation for people sleeping rough during the pandemic. Crucially, migrants with no recourse to public funds (consisting disproportionately of racialised minorities from the Global South—NRPF Network 2021) and European nationals without a Right to Reside were excluded from the 'Everyone In' policy, a fact which some council leaders and migrant rights advocates challenged in the UK courts. On the 3rd of November 2020, the High Court ruled that councils can provide emergency housing during the pandemic to homeless people who would not normally be eligible for support; however, it was left to individual local authority discretion to use alternative powers and funding to assist those with no recourse to public funds (NRPF) who require shelter and other forms of support (Shelter 2021). While there have been no changes to the policy to impose the NRPF, many cash-strapped local authorities continued to exclude ineligible foreign nationals from 'Everyone In', despite the High Court judgement (NRPF Network 2021).

The exclusion of many foreign nationals from emergency homelessness assistance during the ongoing pandemic continues at a time when new immigration rules come into force, providing the UK Government the power to fully roll out an 'Operation Nexus' style programme of removal across the UK. As of the 1st of January 2021, when the Brexit transition period officially ended, rough sleeping has become grounds for refusal, or cancellation of, permission to remain in the UK. Local authorities across England seem well positioned to accommodate a national roll-out: since early 2019, an increasing number of Home Office agents have been embedded in local authority services to monitor advice and

assistance offered to homeless migrants (Busby 2019). The implications for rough sleepers are considerable—it is estimated that more than a quarter of all street homeless persons in the UK are foreign nationals (Grierson 2020). Despite pressure from human rights groups to end 'Operation Nexus' and put a stop to expanded plans to deport EU rough sleepers across the UK post-Brexit, Home Secretary Priti Patel defended the policy, issuing a Home Office clarification stating, 'permission may only be refused or cancelled where a person has repeatedly refused suitable offers of support and engaged in persistent anti-social behaviour' (Mellor 2021). Charities have warned that the new immigration rules will deter some rough sleepers from seeking help and could push them into modern slavery and other exploitative work (Lister 2020). It is not ye<sup>t</sup> clear how COVID-19 impacts on the law enforcement side of crimmigration policies that harness housing and welfare services to facilitate deportations; however, it is apparent that homeless foreign nationals—as the only group of rough sleepers excluded from the 'Everyone In' policy—have become much more visible and therefore easily identifiable as candidates for removal.

The effect of such technologies of surveillance and attrition, therefore, is the entrenchment of the criminalisation of migration in the UK by combining civil exclusions (relating to restricting access to homelessness support services) with deportation as an adjunct to criminal penalty (lacking settled status now constituting an illegal stay for EEA nationals in the UK). Deploying interventions based on force and control—and supported by the identification, categorisation and surveillance functions of the welfare state—deportation secures compliance with immigration policy by removing the possibility of choosing not to comply. By excluding many groups of migrants from the 'Everyone In' policy to remove homeless persons from the street, the pandemic (in combination with Brexit) lays the groundwork to intensify and expand such exceptional use of force to deport unwanted foreign nationals. This example not only illustrates how welfare providers have been made complicit by policy in migration control in a UK context but also how such imagining of 'immigrant criminality' is vital to understand the perceived political expediency of instituting a hostile environment for migrants and in general the legitimacy of social exclusion in societies (Franko 2019). In order to provide a contrasting approach, the next section considers how The Netherlands has approached the governance of migration in housing and welfare delivery.

### *3.2. Technologies of Attrition: The 'Programme of Discouragement' in The Netherlands*

The Netherlands has been long commended for adopting a tolerant and humane approach in the treatment of migrants (Van der Woude et al. 2014). However, since the 1990s, Dutch immigration policies have been characterised by restrictive admission policies, increased exclusion of unauthorised migrants and greater pressure for migration control (Engbersen et al. 2006). Increasingly, the trend towards the securitisation and criminalisation of migrants observed in neoliberal regimes (such as the UK and the US) is emerging in The Netherlands and elsewhere in northern welfare states, prompting crimmigration scholars to question the assumed opposition between neoliberalism and welfarism and scrutinise the exclusionary nature of the welfare state's inclusionary logic (Barker 2018; Franko 2019).

Since the 1990s, The Netherlands was among the first countries in the European Union to reform immigration policy specifically targeting irregular migration, set within a context of a (financially and ideologically) pressurised welfare state—diminishing border controls, despite the EU principle of Freedom of Movement (van der Leun 2003; Leerkes et al. 2012). Policies of attrition have been implemented to prevent entry, exclude from social benefits and public assistance and expel irregular immigrants (van der Leun 2006)—this, in combination with increasingly managerialised austere state-run services, has resulted in growing desperation amongs<sup>t</sup> 'unauthorsied' migrant groups. Alongside tightening migration controls, immigration-related penalties (such as deportation) have been introduced for criminal offences—reversing a trend towards limiting penal power in the turn towards crimmigration control. According to Van der Woude et al. (2014), over the 21st century,

a 'humane paternalism', historically characteristic of the Dutch criminal justice system, has gradually been replaced with a process of 'managerial instrumentalism', deploying punishment as a 'cultural agent'. This newfound drive towards penalty signalled that 'the Dutch have purged themselves of the misplaced leniency of the past and are no longer afraid to punish' (Downes and Van Swaaningen 2007, p. 66).

Moreover, an association between ethnicity and social problems (especially crime and disorder perceived to be linked with migration from Morocco and the Antilles—Van der Woude et al. 2014) has gained political traction, with broad public support for stricter measures in The Netherlands commonly practiced elsewhere in Europe, such as deportation of immigrants who had committed crimes and 'soft' deportations (Versteegh and Maussen 2012). The punitive turn taken in The Netherlands, amid a backdrop of continuously hardening political and social discourse on immigration (and immigrants), can be traced to the 1980s with the Ministry of Justice white papers *Crime and Society* and *Law in Motion*. These policies have been generally regarded as a turning point in Dutch criminal justice policy, forging an indelible link between concerns about immigration and integration, on the one hand, and crime and safety, on the other, in popular and political imagination (Van der Woude et al. 2014). The sharper end of the crimmigration control system in The Netherlands can be observed in the growing criminalisation of migration (for example, the creation of specific immigration-crime offences including criminalising illegal stays). This 'immigrationalization of criminal law' (Legomsky 2007) includes deportation as an adjunct to criminal penalty, as well as expanding grounds for administrative detention on the basis of an immigrant's criminal background. It is important to note that, although deportation is an 'adjunct to criminal penalty', it is not considered a form of punishment despite having clear punitive consequences for the expelled (Van der Woude et al. 2014).

In response to public perception of the connection between immigration and social disorder, the Dutch governmen<sup>t</sup> has turned to increased state coercion (Barker 2012). For example, governmental and quasi-governmental services (including welfare departments and social housing providers) are obliged under the 1998 Linking Act to conduct residency checks prior to giving access to certain services and benefits (Leerkes et al. 2012). Although new investigative powers of public sector and non-profit intermediaries have been expanded by the 2000 Aliens Act (amended in 2013 by the Modern Migration Policy and National Visa Acts), the amount of active surveillance of unauthorised migrants performed by civil service organisations in The Netherlands is limited (van der Leun 2003), owing in part to the resistance of relief organisations in policing migration. Rather than embark on a programme to fully converge criminal and immigration control (as is the aim of British migration policies), it would appear the Dutch approach to migration governance is less punitive and more permissive but nonetheless coercive in its exercise of social control and attrition. Given the emerging nature of the law enforcement side of crimmigration policies in The Netherlands, crimmigration is taken as a 'sensitizing concept' (Van der Woude et al. 2014) in understanding the ways in which welfare is used as a border policing tool.

Amid this backdrop of increasing criminalisation of migration, Dutch civil society includes a paradoxical merger of humanitarian care and securitisation imperatives (Kox and Staring 2020). In this context, humanitarian organisations refer to the wide range of agencies that provide relief to alleviate the hardship of migrants—critically, as Kox and Staring (2020) argued, these support organisations do so whilst simultaneously 'reproducing the causes of migrants' suffering and legitimizing restrictive migration policies' (p. 3). As van der Leun and Bouter (2015) demonstrated, internal border controls have rendered migrants without legal status wholly dependent on the (material and non-material) support of humanitarian organisations. Originally established to offer support to groups excluded from state-provided forms of support—many of these agencies emerged from protest movements against restrictive migration policies—these 'emergency relief' organisations now find themselves in the 'ambiguous' position of advocating for migrant rights whilst collaborating with central authorities in migration control (Kox and Staring 2020, p. 3). Whilst there is a measure of organisational resistance to these processes, empirical evidence

suggests that unauthorised migrants largely consider these humanitarian organisations to be part and parcel of the Dutch migration control system (Kox and Staring 2020).

Thus, since the 1990s, humanitarian organisations have worked in close collaboration with their respective municipalities, limiting their power to resist central migration policies (Kalir and Wissink 2016). In the Dutch case, such organisations are, in effect, coerced by local municipalities via 'control by compliance' (Baines and van den Broek 2017) into implementing a programme of 'soft deportations' (called Assisted Voluntary Return), which function in addition to (or as a replacement of) state deportations (Leerkes et al. 2012). At the same time, participation in 'migration policing networks' has been contested by multiple acts of 'micro-refusal,' posing a challenge to state-centric bordering practices (Weber 2019; King 2016). Such local resistance to harsh immigration policies was articulated in April 2015 when several Dutch municipalities issued a statement in the daily newspaper *Volkskrant* refusing to cooperate with a decision by the then Dutch cabinet to refuse temporary shelter to failed asylum seekers and instead confirmed their continued commitment to provide '*bed-bad-brood*' arrangements providing shelter, bathing facilities and food relief for unauthorised migrants, rather than 'put or leave rejected asylum seekers out on the street' (Versteegh 2016, p. 366).

Even though central authorities have broadly opposed support for migrants residing in The Netherlands unlawfully, the Dutch governmen<sup>t</sup> has never signalled an intent to criminalise such support—although there are financial consequences for municipalities that fail to meet state's expectations concerning resource managemen<sup>t</sup> and policy delivery (Gerard and Weber 2019). Such strategies of attrition mean that, in exchange for support from local municipalities, humanitarian organisations can generally only assist those migrants who meet pre-determined eligibility criteria. The consequence is that only migrants who have a case for legal residency or who agree to voluntarily return to their country of origin are offered support. Emergency relief organisations dependent on municipality support are therefore effectively forced to exclude migrant clients falling outside these criteria (LOS Foundation 2014), demonstrating how indirect control is exercised through systematic withdrawal of services, rather than active intervention. The result is the creation of a 'structurally embedded border' involving 'migration policing networks' (Weber 2013) recruited to have both direct and indirect bordering effects. Denials of service thus create metaphorical but nevertheless powerful borders, leading to differential forms of social, political and economic in/exclusion.

Over the course of the pandemic, this attritional 'control by compliance' has involved 'cutbacks coercion' where state control is exercised through the failure to fund services to adequate levels. In contrast to Hall (2004) definition of coercion, such 'thwarted rights and stunted care' sugges<sup>t</sup> that neglect originates at a systemic level, rather than being arbitrarily imposed, as organisations are under pressure to (reluctantly) act as conduits of control of scarce resources (Baines and van den Broek 2017, p. 142). Such attritional strategies are witnessed in the aforementioned closure and consolidation of several bedbath-bread facilities over the course of the pandemic, resulting in increased numbers of homeless asylum seekers in desperate need of emergency relief (de Waard 2020). In The Netherlands, where unauthorised migrants are excluded from all formal markets and welfare arrangements (and only allowed essential healthcare, legal aid and primary and secondary education), studies on irregular migration have shown that it has become increasingly difficult to survive without a Dutch residence permit (Burgers and Engbersen 1999; Engbersen et al. 2002; Staring and Aarts 2010). In European states with strong welfare safety nets, such as in Scandinavian countries, the principles of universalism and inclusivity can be sustained, despite treating non-nationals punitively—simply because the 'crimmigrant Other' falls outside the responsibility of the welfare state (Barker 2012; Gundhus 2020). However, the closure of core facilities has intensified these struggles, resulting in deep social exclusion with many becoming dependent on (informal and formal) forms of support, and those lacking resources become vulnerable to exploitation and the possibility of engaging in survival crime (Van der Woude et al. 2014). In this way, the

crimmigration–welfare nexus is sustained through an association between migration and extra-legal activities.
