Invisible poverty: migrants, new social policies and the risk of exclusion

This chapter deals with transformations of social policies in recent years and the ways they might have affected migrants, namely referred to a particular set of policies of assistance against the risk of poverty. Assistance policies have been reframed, under the impact of both the crisis of national welfare systems and the action of EU institutions, in terms of policies against social exclusion. Have the new anti-exclusion policies been able to respond also to the goal of fighting ethnic discrimination, a crucial goal for European policies? After all, migrants are especially exposed to the risk of poverty, hence inclusion of migrants should be an integral part of a strategy against social exclusion. As a matter of facts, anti-exclusion policies have marked a narrowing of access to social rights, and migrant populations in particular have faced difficulties in accessing to them. Despite great variations from country to country in conditions for migrants to accessing to social rights, we can see as a constant feature that emergency health care and children education are more likely to be universally accessible; at the opposite end, on the contrary, assistance against poverty is everywhere most problematic, if not totally precluded. The article will argue that the very fact that poverty is treated outside a wider range of social risks and confined to a separate action against social exclusion contributes to make poverty literally invisible in debates about social protection. In the case of immigrants, we see at work a double invisibility: they just cannot be poor, or they will simply not be accepted as legal residents and therefore will be forced into a clandestine condition. This is coherent with restrictive immigration policies, that regard social protection less as a means of integration than as a pull factor attracting migration. Since action is left to member states, social protection and even more particularly social assistance against poverty remain a crucial field of ethnic discrimination