Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland
To be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible (Scott 1998). Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and not issue...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Journal article |
| Language: | English |
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University of California Press
2020
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| _version_ | 1797094928915890176 |
|---|---|
| author | Ustek-Spilda, F Alastalo, M |
| author_facet | Ustek-Spilda, F Alastalo, M |
| author_sort | Ustek-Spilda, F |
| collection | OXFORD |
| description | To be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible (Scott 1998).
Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This is illustrated
in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and not issue them with
ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork in Norway and Finland, and in Eurostat and UNECE, we study how practices of population
registration and statistics compilation on foreign-born persons can be beset by differential, and at
times contradictory outlooks. We show that these outlooks are often presented in the form of
seemingly apolitical software infrastructures or decisions made in response to software with limited,
if any, discretion available to bureaucrats, statisticians and policy-makers. Our two cases, Norway and
Finland are considered social-democratic regimes within Esping-Andersen’s (1990) famous global
social policy typology. Using STS and specifically "double social life of methods", we seek to trace how
software emerges as both a device for administrative book-keeping, but also enacting the "migrant"
categories with particular implications for how the welfare state comes to be established and welfare
policies come to be implemented. We note that even if all statistical production necessarily involves
inclusions and exclusions, how the "boundaries" are set for who to include and exclude directly affects
the lives of those implicated by these decisions (Bowker and Starr 1999), and as such, they are onto
political (Law 2009; Mol 1999). This means that welfare policies get made at the point of sorting,
categorising and ordering of data, even before it is fed into software and other administrative devices
of government. In view of this, we show that methods enact their subjects - we detail how the
methods set to identify and measure refugee statistics in Europe end up enacting the welfare services
they have access to. We argue that with increasing automation and datafication, the scope of welfare
systems is being curtailed under the label of efficiency, and individual and local contexts are ignored.
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| first_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:20:42Z |
| format | Journal article |
| id | oxford-uuid:caea072d-cacc-4e3d-9679-0be582149f47 |
| institution | University of Oxford |
| language | English |
| last_indexed | 2024-03-07T04:20:42Z |
| publishDate | 2020 |
| publisher | University of California Press |
| record_format | dspace |
| spelling | oxford-uuid:caea072d-cacc-4e3d-9679-0be582149f472022-03-27T07:11:03ZSoftware sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and FinlandJournal articlehttp://purl.org/coar/resource_type/c_dcae04bcuuid:caea072d-cacc-4e3d-9679-0be582149f47EnglishSymplectic ElementsUniversity of California Press2020Ustek-Spilda, FAlastalo, MTo be able to govern, administrative bodies need to make objects of government legible (Scott 1998). Yet migrant persons do not fall neatly into the categories of administrative agencies. This is illustrated in the tendency to exclude asylum seekers from various population registers and not issue them with ID numbers, which constitute the backbone of many welfare states in Europe. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Norway and Finland, and in Eurostat and UNECE, we study how practices of population registration and statistics compilation on foreign-born persons can be beset by differential, and at times contradictory outlooks. We show that these outlooks are often presented in the form of seemingly apolitical software infrastructures or decisions made in response to software with limited, if any, discretion available to bureaucrats, statisticians and policy-makers. Our two cases, Norway and Finland are considered social-democratic regimes within Esping-Andersen’s (1990) famous global social policy typology. Using STS and specifically "double social life of methods", we seek to trace how software emerges as both a device for administrative book-keeping, but also enacting the "migrant" categories with particular implications for how the welfare state comes to be established and welfare policies come to be implemented. We note that even if all statistical production necessarily involves inclusions and exclusions, how the "boundaries" are set for who to include and exclude directly affects the lives of those implicated by these decisions (Bowker and Starr 1999), and as such, they are onto political (Law 2009; Mol 1999). This means that welfare policies get made at the point of sorting, categorising and ordering of data, even before it is fed into software and other administrative devices of government. In view of this, we show that methods enact their subjects - we detail how the methods set to identify and measure refugee statistics in Europe end up enacting the welfare services they have access to. We argue that with increasing automation and datafication, the scope of welfare systems is being curtailed under the label of efficiency, and individual and local contexts are ignored. |
| spellingShingle | Ustek-Spilda, F Alastalo, M Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title | Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title_full | Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title_fullStr | Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title_full_unstemmed | Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title_short | Software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in Norway and Finland |
| title_sort | software sorted exclusion of asylum seekers in norway and finland |
| work_keys_str_mv | AT ustekspildaf softwaresortedexclusionofasylumseekersinnorwayandfinland AT alastalom softwaresortedexclusionofasylumseekersinnorwayandfinland |