**2. Materials and Methods**

This study uses a comparative case study approach to consider the different ways of using welfare provision as a border control tool in two superficially contrasting societies: by comparing punitive features of the 'hostile environment' in the UK and the more indirect coercive control mechanisms of the 'programme of discouragement' in The Netherlands. Comparison is useful in highlighting the contingent nature of phenomena, providing insight into the extent to which pre-existing categories are neither natural nor fixed. A comparative method can challenge orthodox thinking, question assumptions and provide theoretical insight (often using interdisciplinary approaches). As Bloemraad (2013) suggested, comparative study provides fertile ground for an analysis of migration processes involving an analysis of a small number of cases to make sense of 'meaningful, complex structures, institutions, collectives and/or configurations of events' (p. 27). There is additional value in studying these issues from a socio-legal perspective as 'international migration implicates rights and legal status as people cross the borders of sovereign nation-states' (Bloemraad 2013, p. 28). Whilst much research on migration has focused on central governmen<sup>t</sup> policy and the legal process, this article considers how exceptional circumstances are integrated into everyday practices through the operation of welfare and support policies.

The article thus examines the role of coercion and consent in bordering practices and how exceptional practices of exclusion become normalised under what has been termed 'necropolitics' (Mbembe 2003). The study has two central research questions: What is the relationship between welfare, housing and crimmigration control and how important is context (including relatively stable socio-political conditions and exceptional states of crisis) in the configuration of crimmigration control?

The study draws on examples of crimmigration control from two seemingly distinct localities with different ideological underpinnings, separate administrative systems, contrasting public policies and diverse social practices. The UK is selected as a paradigmatic neoliberal regime, based on explicitly coercive and punitive strategies of surveillance to control migration, supplemented by restrictive, highly conditional welfare systems in which crimmigration control is clearly articulated. In contrast, The Netherlands is a regime noted for its social democratic ethos, a facilitative model of social integration and a welfare system based on the principles of inclusion and consent. At the same time, The Netherlands demonstrates emerging features of crimmigration practice that challenge the assumed opposition between neoliberalism and welfarism (Barker 2018). These two examples can therefore provide insight into both causes and effects of arrangements to control, limit and (in some cases) facilitate the settlement of migrant groups. As the study argues, in practice, the two regimes share many assumptions and principles: concerning border control, the creation of 'in' and 'out' groups and exclusionary practices. More specifically, the article argues that indirect strategies of attrition have become a key mechanism of exclusion. As Bloemraad suggested 'you cannot know what is unique, or common, about a particular case unless you have a comparative point of reference' (p. 42).

### *Theoretical Framework: Bordering, Crimmigration and Necropolitical Exception*

This research is motivated by three pressing trends in western democratic responses to international displacement and global mobility: (1) the development of observable 'crimmigration' control systems that blur the boundaries between immigration and criminal law, (2) deepening inequality and exclusion based on social divisions such as race, class and gender and (3) increasingly conditional and punitive welfare regimes within an environment of retrenchment and financial austerity. More recently, a fourth trend can be observed during the pandemic, which has ushered in a time of hyper immobility (at least temporarily) as borders close and national as well as localised lockdowns become commonplace, normalising a 'state of exception' in the exercise of unprecedented state power to control contagion—on a global scale. The following section offers an overview of the development of crimmigration control, focussing specifically on the extension of migration governance into the contemporary welfare state.

Globalisation in the last half-century has brought greater interdependence of the world's economies, cultures and populations, accompanied and assisted by technological advances which have enabled growing cross-border flows of investment, people and information (Gundhus and Franko 2016). As the distinction between domestic and international domains is increasingly blurred, 'unwanted' forms of migration (whether humanitarian, undocumented or constituted economic migrants) have become emblematic of a hybrid threat—to national security and sovereignty, on the one hand, and safety and order from *within*, on the other (Koulish and van der Woude 2020). In the US and Europe especially, the responses to the perceived 'threat' of migration have broadly centred on intensifying the 'securitization of migration' (Aas 2013; Guia 2013)—an approach often accompanied by an exclusionary and repressive political and social discourse (Koulish 2010; van der Leun and van der Woude 2013). Such processes of securitisation and exclusion—which radically transform state regulation of migration—have been described as 'crimmigration' to explain the intertwining of criminal and migration control with national security, observed in contemporary western democracy (Stumpf 2006; Guia 2013; Aas 2013).

In this article, bordering practice is conceptualised as involving the exercise of social control by 'inclusionary exclusion' (Agamben 2005), whereby the welfare state apparatus (and other civil society institutions) are co-opted by central authorities in the migration control project (Paasi 2009)—a complicity in crimmigration control which is nevertheless often contested and subject to resistance. However, local sites of 'border resistance' (Weber 2019) tend to be fragmented, ambiguous, idiosyncratic and surpassed by the influences of state control: crimmigration, therefore, has a profound effect on the scope and shape of social welfare *vis-à-vis* bordering practices—transforming humanitarian organisations into 'soft cops of the state' (Poulantzas 1969).

The present study applies Agamben (2005) idea of a 'state of exception' as a dominant paradigm of contemporary government, and the research considers how processes used in a period of crisis (whether financial, social or medical) are instituted within day-today social interactions. By combining this perspective with Mbembe (2003) analysis of 'necropolitics' which integrates the 'politics of race' and the 'politics of death' (p. 17), the article investigates how essential services have 'the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is *disposable* and who is not' (Mbembe 2003, p. 27). From the perspective of 'necropolitical exception' (Farmer 2020), we can therefore explore how welfare structures are co-opted to implement migration control via technologies of surveillance and attrition; processes that exclude noncitizens (often racialised minorities and migrants from the postcolonial Global South) from welfare and housing support (Weber 2019). Through the creation of an exceptional space punctuated by dependence and vulnerability that would otherwise be unacceptable for citizens, welfare becomes a 'necropolitical site of violence' where migrant groups are 'kept alive but in a state of injury' (Mbembe 2003, p. 21) through the conditional delivery and denial of essential services.

By drawing on the literature on crimmigration in the UK and The Netherlands, the next sections contrast the bordering practices deployed in the delivery of accommodation and support services for migrant groups—contrasting the use of 'administrative removals' in the UK (through 'Operation Nexus' and 'Everyone In' policies—based on surveillance and coercion) with a 'programme of discouragement' (based on a principle of consent and attrition) in The Netherlands (van der Leun 2003). Whilst crimmigration can be seen as

a modality of coercion, it should be noted that not all examples of coercion are evidence of crimmigration1. Nevertheless, the study shows how these exclusionary technologies of surveillance and attrition have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic with welfare agencies complicit in policing the border as 'agents of necropolitical exception' (Farmer 2020) in both direct and indirect ways.
