"An Especially Thankless Work"? Filtering Practices in Emergency Shelters and Ethical Dilemmas for Street-level Social Workers in Western Switzerland.

Based on an ethnographic survey conducted in services for the homeless in French-speaking Switzerland, this paper examines street-level social workers' struggles between the implementation of official policies and their direct work with people. Beyond their common condition of homelessness, people looking for shelter are a very heterogeneous group: undocumented migrants and foreign workers rub shoulders with poor, local pensioners, or with persons suffering from drug addiction or mental illness. Guided by national and international residence and labour legislation, local authorities and institutions have their own policies – more or less strict in their exclusion of poor migrants – regarding the legitimate beneficiaries of a place in the emergency accommodation system. In this article, we analyse the encounters of street-level social workers with homeless people and examine the practical, value-based and ethical dilemmas they face, as well the use of their discretionary power in making more - or less - appropriate shelter available for destitute migrants.

Keywords: Homelessness; migration; emergency accommodation

Nathalie V.: At the same time, I still have the feeling that day after day I am powerlessbut... I also bring what I can bring and it's not nothing. It's never nothing.I: What about your motivations to work with the homeless... have they changed over time,with experience?

Nathalie V.: Not really. The only thing is, there is one part of the work that is particularlythankless. We work with criteria that I'm not always comfortable with. We leave a lot ofpeople out there. And it's difficult.

This quotation is an excerpt from an interview with Nathalie V. , a social worker in her fifties who has extensive experience in the field of asylum, precarity and homeless shelters, both in the associative and in the public sectors in Western Switzerland. Her words address several elements this article aims to highlight: Social workers in homeless services frequently express a feeling of powerlessness in relation to their mission, due to the scale of their task and the limited resources at their disposal. Institutions providing these services deal with the lack of resources allocated to their activity by engaging in gatekeeping practices. The use of admission or priority criteria, for example, leads to the de facto exclusion of certain categories of homeless people, especially migrants with precarious legal status, causing the discomfort expressed by Nathalie V. This article is about social workers' strategies to resolve the dilemmas they face in carrying out of their work in a context in which the demand for services for the homeless far exceeds the supply.

In Switzerland, there are no specific policies or measures that "explicitly and primarily relate to dealing with and combatting existing homelessness", a phenomenon that remains largely invisible in the statistics on poverty and in political debate ([8]: 22). Current services partly find their origin in the activities of private non-profit organisations and churches active in the field of precarity and partly in the so-called low-threshold programmes for drugdependent people that arose as part of the risk reduction policies implemented in the 1990s ([35]). In both cases, overnight accommodation, food, hygiene and medical care were to be offered unconditionally, i.e. without any proof of identity required, asking few or no questions of those seeking to use the facilities and being open to everyone.

However, the number of people using these services has increased, and they now constitute a heterogeneous population, while institutions have not been granted the resources to adapt to this new situation. Beyond their common condition of homelessness, people seeking accommodation in the various shelters and other assistance services are indeed very diverse: asylum seekers whose request has been denied, undocumented migrants, and intra-EU migrants with or without a temporary working permit rub shoulders with poor local pensioners, persons made vulnerable by ongoing changes in the labour market and restrictions on social assistance, and people with addictions or mental illness. This makes Switzerland in no way different from other European countries, where in recent years destitute migrants have been found to represent an increasing proportion of homeless people ([28]; [26]).

The question this article specifically asks is: how do social workers negotiate the practical and ethical dilemmas they face during their encounters with homeless people, for instance when deciding their eligibility for services? Studies have indeed shown that even if genuine unconditional access to homeless services is rarely applied in practice, institutions and their social workers may feel strongly bound by this ideal ([15]; [25], forthcoming).

Informed by Lipsky's analysis of street-level bureaucrats (2010 [1980]) and authors who have drawn on his work, we consider street-level workers' perspectives and ways of doing that are of utmost importance to understanding the implementation of the system. After a presentation of this analytical perspective, the article offers insights into the ethnographic fieldwork, methods and data from which we draw our arguments. It then provides information on the legal and policy limbo surrounding homelessness in Switzerland. Finally, the article presents some formal or less formal solutions cobbled together by social workers to tackle the situation. The "bricolage" metaphor, as the art of making "do with 'whatever is at hand'" ([21]: 17), best describes these arrangements, both practically and in terms of meanings assigned to the experience by social workers themselves ([38]).

Since the beginning of the 1980s, in Western societies, governmental responses to homelessness have treated the problem as "emergencies" ([23]), "the handling of which requires deviations from already institutionalised social policies: exceptional financing, special public/ private contractualisation, organisational innovations, measures targeted at immediate needs and focused on short-term solutions" ([23]: 125). The social emergency model that emerged was aimed at relieving the plight of people concerned in an unconditional manner, meaning that assistance was to be delivered without consideration or conditions other than need, with no eligibility criteria and without any financial or behavioural expectations ([15]). In Switzerland as elsewhere, unconditional intervention is one of several underlying principles guiding welfare actors in their action against poverty, and it is explicitly set out in the philosophy of many associations and their social workers ([25], forthcoming).

In order to understand how homelessness services and their workers deal with the ideal of unconditionality in a context of resource scarcity and of service provision to heterogeneous populations, we take Michael Lipsky's work on "street-level bureaucracy" as our point of departure. The concept developed by Lipsky in his seminal book addresses an essential paradox in how public policies are carried out by bureaucrats who are in direct contact with the public: "On the one hand, the work is often highly scripted to achieve policy objectives that have their origins in the political process. On the other hand, the work requires improvisation and responsiveness to the individual case" ([22]: xii). Hence street-level bureaucrats do have a certain amount of leeway to carry out their mission, with the consequence – a central idea in Lipsky's work – that public policy is, in fact, created at the interface between bureaucrats and service users. The exercise by street-level bureaucrats of "discretionary power", in Lipsky's words, may either be favourable or contrary to the interests of service users; in any case, it is indispensable to the performance of the work. While this perspective initially focused on public services, it was subsequently expanded by scholars using this approach − in the context of increased government contracting − to voluntary organisations and their social workers that have a role in the dispensation of public benefits ([30]). Several dilemmas that streetlevel workers have to resolve have been identified, of which two are of particular interest for this paper: "demand versus supply" and "responsiveness versus standardisation" ([18]).

When there is a lack of resources and demand exceeds supply, organisations may view the rationing of service provision as an inevitable response. Rationing may either be formal (through the use of eligibility tests for instance) or informal (delays, or other tactics to ensure that users do not have the information they need to assert their rights) ([29]). Other deterrent strategies that may be used by organisations or administrations include monetary hurdles (charging a fee for the service), creaming (assisting those who seem to have fewer problems or problems that can be more easily handled), or psychological (such as lack of respect towards beneficiaries) ([22]). In the field of homelessness, in the French context, Gardella forged the concept of "containment" to account for different practices enabling homeless services to avail themselves of the principle of unconditionality despite the lack of resources:

[Containment] brings together the various actions that take into account the norm of unconditionality but try to limit its effective scope. It can take on several forms [...]. When the actors, fearing that the posting of an unconditional welcome will attract exponential demand, discourage the use of emergency measures, containment is indirect. Categorybased containment consists, on the other hand, of limiting unconditionality, paradoxical as it may seem, to a certain category of beneficiaries (Gardella 2014a : 249).

Both direct (category-based) and indirect containment are implemented in homeless shelters in Western Switzerland. Indirect containment consists, for example, of imposing time constraints on when access is available and for how long: making clients leave the shelter during the day, preventing them from storing personal belongings, and limiting length of stay. These rules, as well as a requested financial contribution of 5 CHF per night, are supposed to limit the attractiveness of the system and avoid the long-term installation of users, thus ensuring their turnover ([17]). Category-based containment not only aims at limiting the number of persons who use the services, but also at mitigating the supposedly negative consequences of too much diversity ([15]). The practices brought together under this term may, as we shall see later, be formalised through public policies or institutions' internal rules, but they may also be left to the appreciation of street-level social workers.

The other dilemma street-level workers have to resolve pertains to the balance between responsiveness and standardisation: Their ideal is to take clients' individual needs into consideration; yet, in practice and in order to accomplish the tasks entrusted to them in a given regulatory and organisational context, they need to deal with clients as a mass ([5]; [6]). Mass processing of clients requires routines, including the classification of people. Formal processing is the operation that transforms individuals, with their personal biographies, circumstances and needs, into claimants through the use of a small number of categories and definitions that simplify administrative work. Informal processing consists of selecting certain cases for special treatment, based on value-laden categories, which are ranked on a scale of deservingness ([6]); this in turn may lead to shorthand rules and stereotyping ([5]). These different categorisation processes, at the heart of direct containment and other gate-keeping practices, will be the object of particular scrutiny in the analysis presented in this paper.

The argument of this article draws on an ethnographic study conducted in Western Switzerland since March 2018. It aims at understanding (i) homeless peoples' itineraries, living conditions and needs, (ii) the ways in which the staff involved in the aid structures respond to these needs in a context of scarcity of resources, and (iii) uncovering how local social policies and legal frameworks produce particular vulnerabilities. The core of our ethnographic material was produced in one canton (that we shall call Canton A), but we also conducted interviews with managers of institutions for the homeless in three other cantons in Western Switzerland. In Canton A, ethnographic observations were made within three emergency shelters: la Maison, which is operated by a local militant association and funded by city authorities, and le Balcon and le Refuge, two shelters operated by L'Entraide, a large association active in the field of precarity, partly funded by the canton. We also made observations in a night drop-in centre (Le Repos), which is fully funded by city authorities but was set up at the initiative of a private foundation which also operates it, and in La Pause, a day drop-in centre run by the municipal social services. We also carried out qualitative interviews of twelve social workers from the structures, outside of their working hours. Employees in shelters or other services for the homeless have different educational and professional profiles. Some have a degree in social work or social policy analysis, others do not; all have been working as social workers for several years. Some of them, particularly at La Maison and Le Repos, campaign for the rights of the homeless and undocumented migrants.

During a first phase of the research project, we were mandated by a municipality to conduct an evaluation of a city drop-in centre for homeless people. We were first and informally 'assessed' by some shelters' employees to see if we were allies or not. Because we had a critical enough perspective from their point of view – in particular by distancing ourselves from the municipality's expectations in terms of the categorisation of users by legal status and origin, for both empirical and ethical reasons – we were accepted. Our entry to the field was also welcome and thus greatly facilitated by the institutions' team leaders. As Franz found in her own research on a similar terrain, we assume that both managers and shelters employees perceived our research as a way of giving some visibility and drawing the attention of political circles to their action in the field ([13]). In each shelter or drop-in centre in which we conducted observations, we presented ourselves to the staff and were in turn presented to shelter users – whenever possible – as researchers. With one exception – the night drop-in centre Le Repos, where we helped social workers pass out hot drinks and snacks – we did not actively participate in the facilities' activities. However, the issue of how the guests perceived us, how they interpreted the purpose of our research as well as their motivations for interacting with us – during our presence in the shelters, we had informal interviews with about thirty homeless persons – remains open for discussion.

In most Western countries, homelessness is a well-established field of academic research. In Switzerland on the other hand, there are no official statistics, nor any definition of homelessness that would allow for an estimate of the prevalence of this extreme form of poverty on the national level ([20]; [33]; [8]). Research on this topic has commenced only recently, and most Swiss sociological studies are thematically focused either on precarity, housing conditions and poverty ([20]), or on specific groups of people, e.g. persons involved in begging in the public domain (Tabin/Knüsel 2014) or persons with drug dependency or mental illness ([32]), rather than on homelessness as such. This lack of scientific knowledge on the subject reflects and simultaneously feeds into a low level of political interest. As a consequence, homelessness is not the object of a coordinated plan or of explicit policies, either at federal or cantonal level ([8]).

The Swiss federal structure accounts for highly fragmented and decentralised social policies, managed at federal, cantonal and local (municipal) levels

([10]; [3]). On the legislative level, the Federal Constitution makes housing a social right and further provides in Article 12 that "anyone who is in a situation of distress and unable to provide for his or her needs has the right to be assisted and to receive the means necessary to lead a life in accordance with human dignity". This translates, for example in the Constitution of the Vaud Canton, into Article 33, which stipulates that "everyone in need has the right to adequate emergency housing and to the means indispensable for leading a life worthy of human dignity". Much has been written about the implementation of the concept of human dignity in the Swiss Constitution. For example:

reference to the concept of dignity was explicitly excluded from the new Vaud law of 7 March 2006, on assistance to asylum seekers and certain categories of foreigners. In other words, the constitutional concept of human dignity does not guarantee that the same level of social help will be provided to all needy people (Tabin et al. 2011 : 474).

The minimum rights to financial support and social protection as they are defined in the Constitution allow for different interpretations, in particular when it comes to whom they apply to. Indeed, they contradict new forms of territorial closure that are at work in Switzerland just as in the rest of Europe ([11]), as is demonstrated in contributions to this special issue (see for example Lindberg). Most social services and entitlements, be they in cash or in kind, are tied to local (communal or cantonal) residence, leaving people from other places and particularly foreigners without a residence permit out of any kind of social protection ([36]; [34]).

Public funding for services for the homeless is provided partly by the cantons and partly by city authorities, the latter being responsible for organising them, with very large differences in coverage between them. Some services, such as shelters, may also be partly self-financed by associations or foundations through donations or through resources derived from their own economic activities.

At the national policy level, there is little public debate on the topic. A rare exception was the interpellation submitted by a member of the National Parliament to the Federal Government in 2014 on 'Emergency Shelters for the Homeless in Switzerland'. Its author highlighted the extent of the problem and pointed to discrepancies in terms of service provision and number of emergency beds from one city to the other. The debate that followed mainly addressed the issue of the devolution of responsibilities between the Confederation and the Cantons. However, in the end, the status quo prevailed, with responsibilities in the field of homelessness kept vague by policymakers. Regionally and locally, the issue of homeless people is debated, mainly through the press, with citizens' collectives or associations regularly challenging the authorities on the topic and with larger urban centres declaring themselves abandoned by the cantons or by smaller municipalities in the face of this problem. Local politicians and policy makers seem to waver between compassion, fear of scandals caused by the discovery of a person having died of the cold while sleeping rough, and the welfare magnet hypothesis, i.e. that a supposedly overly generous service provision will result in an exponential flow of homeless people into their cities ([16]).

The fact that cantons and cities are suspected of trying to 'pass the buck' on the issue of homelessness to other levels of government or other regions is also intrinsically linked to the presence, within the homeless population, of "migrants with precarious legal status", a term that highlights "the fluidity of status [...] as people shift between different statuses – including asylum seeker, rejected asylum seeker, undocumented migrant, and holder of temporary residence permit" ([39]: 79). Persons whose requests for asylum have been denied are under particular scrutiny, as they are supposed to leave Switzerland. Since 2008, all asylum seekers who have received a negative decision or a decision that their case is not to proceed, have been deprived of regular social assistance. They have nevertheless, until their departure, access to a programme called Emergency Aid. This assistance programme, which is funded by the cantons, consists of collective housing, basic health insurance and a small financial allowance. Most collective centres providing accommodation are set up in rather remote locations, and some of them are described by Sanchez-Mazas as "quasi concentration regimes" with "systematic entrance checks, obligation of presence, prohibition of visits" and controls by the authorities in "all aspects of everyday life" (2015: 2). Moreover, people using Emergency Aid have to regularly renew their eligibility "by presenting themselves at the immigration offices (sometimes every 2 to 5 days), where most often they experience pressures to leave, intimidations, as well as derogatory or even humiliating treatments" ([31]).

Emergency Aid is also available to undocumented non-EU/EFTA countries nationals with no financial resources, but in order to obtain this assistance, these persons must report to the population services and participate in the organisation of their return to their country of origin. The living conditions associated with this system maintain asylum seekers and undocumented migrants "in a state of controlled illegality" and are deemed largely counterproductive: while they are designed to discourage people from staying in Switzerland, "most of the targeted individuals actually [go] out of administrative controls, while remaining on the territory in an irregular manner" ([31]: 2). These people are joining cohorts of people sleeping rough or in emergency accommodation in Swiss cities, which causes a paradoxical situation, highlighted by many of our interlocutors on the field: cantonal Emergency Aid centres for people with no legal status are allegedly empty, while shelters for the homeless in the heart of cities are saturated. Obviously, this system of differentiated provision of emergency accommodation for migrants with precarious legal status has a considerable impact on how institutions for the homeless define the legitimate beneficiaries of their services, as we shall see in the next section.

Across Western Switzerland, the accessibility of homeless services for migrants with precarious legal status takes place along a continuum. At one end of this continuum, some institutions formally reject migrant clients; at the other end, very low-threshold institutions with very low levels of services, practice fully unconditional access. Various combinations of factors influence this access. Resource scarcity – a result of political choices and budget trade-offs – has been shown to be one of the main drivers of both formal and informal gatekeeping practices in homeless services, but other factors also play a role, such as organisational cultures and policy ambiguities ([1]). Increased government contracting in the associative sector also has an impact on how non-profit associations define their beneficiaries, as well as on their capacities to care for them, because of their dependency on state resources and the increased controls associated with it ([30]). As far as policy ambiguities are concerned, as discussed in the previous section, there is no coordinated federal action plan framed to fight homelessness that could guide the work of institutions, including a definition of their beneficiaries. In some cantons, there are formal restrictions excluding migrants with precarious legal status, but this is not systematic. For example, the only emergency shelter for homeless people in canton B, which is managed by a private foundation partly subsidised by the government, announces officially, in its concept document, its eligibility criteria: being an adult; priority given to people from the canton; asylum seekers not admitted. Presenting an identity document is required during the admission process and the shelter has to report all new admissions to the local police department. According to the manager of this institution, not surprisingly, very few undocumented migrants ask for emergency shelter. When this does happen, an exception is made for one night, and people are then re-directed to Emergency Aid centres. The spatial exclusion of rejected asylum seekers and other irregularised individuals in shelters echoes other practices of "hostile hospitality" highlighted in this special issue (see Fox). However, even when there is no formal cantonal restriction of access, some institutions may choose to turn down undocumented migrants. Such is the case of a leading association in the field of homelessness – the only one active in Canton C – that has a mandate from canton authorities but still has to self-finance a large part of its operating budget. When we asked the manager who decided their admission criteria, he replied:

We did, before they were imposed upon us by the authorities. We don't have a solution for everyone. Otherwise we would not be able to do what we do; we would be confined to doing emergency [services] [...]. I fully accept that this is so and I don't pretend to have a moral responsibility for everything we can't do (Interview Marc L., 7th June 2019).

It is not entirely clear whether it is fear of the authorities, or the will to maintain the best possible quality of services, that leads to decisions not to admit migrants with precarious legal status. In any case, it illustrates the way in which organisational culture can play a role when an institution decides to focus on one type of beneficiaries and one type of strategy – in this case, integrated social measures through housing.

Other institutions that do not impose formal restrictions of access still have to deal with shortages of beds, and they do so through a prioritisation of those entitled to overnight accommodation. Most institutions practice gate-keeping based on priority criteria, usually a combination of local ties, gender, age, and employment situation. In one of the cities in canton A, this system has reached a high level of formalisation and centralisation. Homeless people are required to go to what is called, rather euphemistically, the "Booking Office", which handles the admission process of the entire emergency accommodation system of the city. There are two permanent night shelters, one run by a local association (La Maison), the other by the Salvation Army (Le Furet), both partly funded by the canton and under a state mandate; another shelter, open only during winter months, is operated directly by the city social services, as well as additional temporary structures when the Cold Weather Plan is activated. Homeless persons have to be identified, determining their right to obtain a bed and the duration of their stay in the shelter. Beds are allocated on a priority scale, with three levels of priority. The highest priority concerns people who can demonstrate lawful residence in the city or the canton. These persons are entitled to blocks of 14 consecutive nights in an emergency shelter, renewable without time limit but on the condition that they regularly visit the Booking Office. This requirement allows social services to exercise a certain level of control over these people, for whom other social measures exist, such as transitional housing, and who therefore should ideally not be using the emergency accommodation system. A second group is comprised of people who are not resident but who are deemed vulnerable, as defined by the administration: being a woman, being under 18 or over 60 years old, or suffering from a chronic or transient illness. This second level of priority has been broadened to encompass people whose trajectories make it possible to pre-classify them as future residents, for example because their employment will lead to a work permit. Being attributed to this second group also allows people to have access to a bed for a period of 14 consecutive nights, as long as there are beds available. The existence of this group of predominantly working poor immigrants reveals that some of the homeless hold precarious, undeclared or under-declared jobs in certain sectors of the local economy, highlighting what Emmanuel Terray refers to as "la délocalisation sur place" ("offshoring on-the-spot") ([37]).

The last group concerns all other homeless people, i.e. non-local male residents (Swiss from other cantons or foreigners) with no prospect of becoming residents of the canton and deemed non-vulnerable. They are entitled to blocks of 7 nights in winter and 2 nights in summer, provided, of course, that beds are available. Given the current saturation of the emergency shelter system, people being categorised in this group are very unlikely to get a bed.

We will see in the following section that although this system is extremely constraining for the shelters, which do not have a decision-making power in the process, social workers have some leeway – though limited – in the allocation of a small number of beds, or are able to take in a few more people than authorised; this latter strategy does not however compensate for an overall shortage of places.

The creation and implementation of the booking system in this city was met with resistance from field workers. The local activist association running one of the shelters (La Maison), which had previously fought the municipal authorities on the issue of the requirement to refer undocumented migrants to Emergency Aid, reacted strongly to what it considered to be a major threat to low-threshold access principles, in particular to the right to anonymity of its users. Under threat of losing its subsidy, this association eventually integrated the booking system, but several social workers refused to participate and resigned.

At the time of our fieldwork, uneasiness was a widely expressed feeling among the street-level social workers we interviewed, both in relation to the shortage of beds and to the priority system. They were all dismayed by having to leaving out so many people, and especially by the idea of systematically leaving out the same category of people, i.e. undocumented young migrants. The "dirty work" ([19]) of filtering people was largely shifted to the Booking Office, its employees expressing the same dismay:

Yes, it's clearly a discriminatory system, and it's very hard to accept, because it's not fair. From one person to another, it's based on, well, very little. "Are you a woman? You have the right to two weeks, non-stop. Are you a man? You take what's left, and right now there's really nothing left" (Interview Laurent N., 27th September 2019).

Indeed, as was confirmed by Nathalie V., at the time of our investigation, it had been three weeks since the booking office had last been able to assign a bed to a non-priority person. The system was overwhelmed by EU migrants with temporary working contracts, and with families from Eastern Europe. She felt worried about leaving working people outside, because "That's a pretty fast way to lose a job. I mean, one night without sleep, and 8 hours on a job site. It doesn't work that way". But she was also questioning the principle of this emergency accommodation system, which was filled on a permanent basis by families and poor (mainly) E.U. workers, leaving little or no chance for others to be sheltered.

However, and even though social workers from different contexts (associations and municipal services) do express criticism about this booking system, the ones we have interviewed also tend to acknowledge that it has simplified their work. Because filtering decisions are largely made elsewhere, tensions have lowered at the entrance to the shelters:

There used to be forty people who didn't know if they could sleep there or not. Whereas now maybe there are still forty people, but twenty-five already know that they have the reservation. There is less tension (Interview Alicia T., 1st October 2019).

This social worker is a woman in her late twenties, with several years' experience in social work with asylum seekers and emergency shelters, currently working for the municipal day drop-in La Pause. She explained to us that she did several rounds of night duty in the shelter before this booking system was implemented; at that time, social workers would call the beneficiaries from an upstairs window at the time of admission, because there was too much tension and even sometimes violence at the door. In the same vein, another social worker explained to us that this booking system also makes homeless people's life easier. The man, who is in his twenties, is involved in housing rights groups, and works as a night watchman in La Maison a few times a month:

As far as our own work is concerned, beyond the ethical issues and all, it's quite practical in fact. In itself, this booking system is not bad, people know that they're going to sleep for two weeks in one place, not just for a night, from day to day. So that's good. It's just the prioritisation that's... questionable, let's say (Interview Stéphane G., 23rd September 2019).

Street-level social workers have some room for manoeuvre when they implement the rules. We have observed in several shelters, for example, a tolerance in the storage of personal items in the rooms for people who are allocated a stay of several consecutive nights. We also noticed, through informal discussions with homeless people or through observations, that the duration of the stays may be negotiated in some cases, when social workers feel that the person is in the process of being reintegrated through work, for example. We observed in La Maison that the social workers sometimes also override the 5 CHF per night fee requirement when people have not been able to raise the money during the day. However, the social workers also said that they cannot afford to generalise these exemption practices, because the collection of the CHF 5 is necessary to balance the association's financial accounts.

In terms of the number of people accommodated, room for manoeuvre lies in the fact that each shelter has an official number of beds, plus a few reserve beds that may be used in case the police or the medical mobile unit bring in someone with no reservation during the night. For example, Le Balcon has 18 beds plus 1 reserve bed, and Le Refuge has 24 beds and 3 reserve beds. In La Maison there is – according to discussions with several social workers and homeless people – a reputation of being more flexible with the rules, and employees have all experienced playing with the shelter's capacity to accommodate more people:

We have our rules, but... when it is cold outside and it rains and a 60-year-old person is at the door and says, "I have no place to sleep", well, we accept them. And then, as shelter night staff, we've all been through situations where we've accepted too many people and we've seen that it's not okay. There were 7 people in a room for 5. And then there were two people snoring. And then, as a result, it's tense. And then, as a result, people can't sleep. And then everyone's angry in the morning. And then... and, you know, it's bad. Yeah, that's really the hardest part about this job. It's telling yourself what's right, that what you think is right. Because on the one hand there are rules [...] but it's just a matter of emergencies. In any case, that's all we ever face, emergency situations, and we always have to assess where the emergency is (Interview Stéphane G., 23rd September 2019).

Stéphane G. and his colleagues are constantly struggling to find a balance between their own limits and values, how they relate to people left outside, and their responsibilities in "keeping the house running" and in ensuring the comfort of as many people as possible. The "rules", including the prioritisation system, are meant to serve as benchmarks in this work, but they are not sufficient to avoid ethical conflicts in the performance of their work. Their militant activities in favour of homeless people outside the shelter – when they are engaged in such activities – allow them to reconcile these rules with their ethos. Yet they have set up their own system for allocating their extra beds, based on a rotation of non-priority persons, in an attempt to be as fair as possible.

So far, we have explored practices aimed at managing the problem of limited resources and of demand exceeding supply. We will now turn to another issue front-line organisations must deal with, namely the heterogeneity of the homeless population.

Academic debates within European research circles tend to show that causes and patterns of migrant homelessness are different from those of local homeless people, and that their needs for support also differ. Migrants tend to have fewer mental health or drug-related problems, their homelessness more often resulting from their legal status, high levels of unemployment and financial problems ([12]; [4]). Although this general statement needs to be qualified, it does echo the statements of some of our interviewees. Nathalie V. – team manager of the day drop-in centre La Pause, who is employed by city authorities – identifies different types of homelessness (in her words, there is a "migrant homelessness", a "Swiss homelessness" and a "European homelessness"). In her view, members of these three groups, having different rights and statuses, also have different stances: "There are the homeless who are homeless because they can't keep a home, and there are those who would dream of having a home but can't have one. It is a very different perspective on life" (Interview 21st September 2019). According to her, the response is currently not only insufficient in quantitative terms, but it is also undifferentiated: while homeless services are used by very a heterogeneous population of clients, they provide the same basic services for all. This speaks to the issue of the "responsiveness versus standardization dilemma" ([18]) that social workers face and have to solve in practice.

A first pitfall lies in the very description of the population attempting to access services for the homeless. First, describing categories of homeless persons entails the risk of essentialising the administrative categories that produce or reproduce situations of exclusion. Second, the legal situations in which people find themselves are complex, as are their trajectories; they are frequently not entirely aware of the legal aspects of their situations, nor of their rights ([24]; [39]). Third, in low-threshold service provision and where attempts are made to implement norms of unconditionality, no proof of identity is required. Understanding who users are is partly left to the subjective appreciation of either social workers, or, in our case, researchers.

Social workers adopt various stances with regard to the description of their beneficiaries, depending on the history and organisational culture of their organisation. For some, using ethnicity, nationality or legal status to categorise clients is not viewed as an issue; for others however, a strong mistrust is expressed with regard to the description of beneficiaries through profiles. This reluctance, mostly found within associations that have a history of activism and advocacy in the field of migration, precarity or homelessness, is inherent to an ethical stance and part and parcel of a commitment to the populations served. These professionals choose to refer to people by what brings them together (the lack of a home) rather than by their geographical and cultural origin, as exemplified by the following excerpt from a focus group with social workers in an entirely unconditional access, low-threshold night drop-in (Le Repos):

I: Have you identified any profiles?

FG: It is a difficult question. Yes, of course, there are life course categories, but even that... what is the common point between an undocumented migrant from Georgia and an undocumented migrant who has crossed the Mediterranean? They are all homeless, they are all sleeping rough. There is no point in creating categories of poverty (Focus group, 1st May 2018).

The argument put forward by these social workers is that categorisations do not make sense for social intervention addressing a common basic need: the lack of a roof over one's head. According to another social worker, in the night shelter La Maison, not classifying people by their ethnic group or country of origin is crucial, because this would be likely to give more legitimacy to some users than to others, thus creating a hierarchy among them:

There is also a confidentiality thing, a professional position, because these are still quite sensitive issues, sometimes, especially at the political level, because we don't just welcome homeless Swiss people who are 'good poor' from birth, but also migrants or Roma and it's... let's say it's something that... depending on who you are talking to, you don't necessarily say, precisely so as not to fuel a debate that you don't want to go into [...]. The approach we have is that people who sleep on the street, regardless of their origin and of the reasons why they are outside our door, we will do everything we can to welcome them. But it does not really match the policies that are implemented in Switzerland, at least here (Interview Thierry H., 17th October 2019).

This shelter employee, who is in his early thirties, has several years' experience in various areas of social work and outreach. He points out the necessity of remaining discreet about the legal or political status of homeless clients; even though organisations in the canton have managed, so far, to avoid being strictly barred from sheltering undocumented migrants, this status quo is fragile. He refers to the "good poor" as those who were born Swiss and are therefore considered the legitimate users of services by political decision-makers. However, historical research on social assistance has shown that "it is in fact the age-old obsessions of sorting out the poor that are openly manifested and, with them, the borderline between deserving citizens and deviant categories, 'good' and 'bad' poor" ([14]: 47). In the case of contemporary homelessness, the issue at stake is the legal or political status of people, their local belonging, with irregularised migrants portrayed as illegitimate in Switzerland and the least deserving of state support (see Annika Lindberg's contribution, in this special issue, for an enlightening demonstration of the construction of the figure of the undeserving, undesirable poor in the asylum process in Denmark).

The policies that the social worker quoted above refers to provide that undocumented migrants are to use the Emergency Assistance schemes operated for them by the cantons and should keep away from city shelters for the homeless. One of his colleagues in La Maison underlines the link between the sensitive nature of the subject (the origin of beneficiaries) and political and financial issues, as the question of who "pays for them" is at stake:

This question is quite important politically because politicians are trying to transfer some social assistance costs to budgets related to immigration, for example. So, what is the issue really? The question is "who gives the money?". For example, the city [...] will say "ah but you take in so many 'foreign' people, so it's not up to us to subsidise you, it's up to the canton" because it's the canton that deals with asylum and immigration (Interview Laurence B., 2nd October 2019).

Public debates on the proportion of migrants among the poor, which originate in the politico-media sphere, are regularly exacerbated by security issues framed in racist overtones, such as the criminalisation of begging in public spaces or the alleged presence of drug dealers among clients of homeless shelters ([24]), soup-kitchens, or other services. Low-threshold institutions or militant groups that provide services in unconditional ways are indeed regularly blamed for supporting criminals.

Yet, the fact that these activist social workers refrain from using "categories of poverty" and from categorising forms of homelessness does not mean that they do not have to deal with the issue of differences among their beneficiaries, both in terms of recognising their specific needs and in terms of coexistence inside the shelter. For example, in La Maison, the allocation of people in different rooms is based upon the community to which they are viewed as belonging, although this is not satisfactory for the social workers:

Then, the thing about communities... so we try, but it's really theoretical... we say we don't want to ghettoise the rooms. And then, putting all the Blacks together, putting all the Roma together, all the Arabs together. Anyway... but at the same time, it's much cooler for them. It's one thing to say: you have to mix people. But all human beings, in the end, when they are in a place they don't know or that is not necessarily safe or secure, well they want to be with people from the same community, or who speak the same language. And so, we try to guarantee that, and things go much better (Interview Thierry H., 17th October 2019).

Despite these practical arrangements, these social workers are very cautious, publicly, not to provide arguments that could be used against some of their beneficiaries.

Beyond the issue of service provision adapted to specific needs, the 'groupeffect' (sharing, for instance a common nationality or ethnic origin) also generates practical dilemmas for social workers in the context of unconditional access and highly diverse beneficiaries ([27]; [36]). Poor migrants, who have access to few services and benefits, whose networks are limited, who are unfamiliar with the system, and who do not speak the language, tend to group together as peers. Forming a group may constitute a huge advantage, in terms of security in the public space for example, or for accessing low-threshold services, but it constitutes a challenge for service providers ([27]).

Our interviewees from various contexts (municipal services as well as NGOs) insisted, for example, on the necessity of preserving a 'balanced mix' among the people using their services. They allegedly observed that, when a community becomes clearly preponderant in term of numbers, this produces a deterrent effect on isolated individuals, particularly on the 'locals' but also on minorities. Two examples will illustrate how this is tackled by the institutions concerned:

The first case is a day drop-in centre in a major city in Canton D. It is run by an independent association that provides a heated space 5 days a week and serves breakfast. This place offers fully unconditional access during its opening hours, and it sets no limits to the number of people admitted. In addition to this free access activity, the association proposes individualised projects to people, which range from dealing with health problems to professional retraining to assistance returning to the country of origin. Participation in a project is proposed to any one frequenting the space, regardless of legal status, and is adapted to individual possibilities. In the context of these individualised projects, people are also given the opportunity to work for the association as part of the reception teams. Within these teams, the association ensures that some diversity is maintained:

We are careful to try to be mixed. All the time. We don't want a team with only Arabs, or Africans, etc. For them, too, so that they learn how to work in a diverse environment [...].

We have a lot of black Africans, Gambians, Nigerians, etc. All of a sudden if breakfast is only served by English-speaking Africans, um... I know very well that in three days our Algerians will not be happy! We really need to represent all this diversity as well (Interview Natacha R., 9th July 2019).

According to this social worker – a woman in her late twenties trained as a social care worker with several years' experience in low-threshold reception work – the "balanced mix" aims at "making everyone feel welcome" as no community is over-represented in the reception staff, as well as at encouraging everyone to "overcome prejudices, learn to live together and respect each other" (Natacha R.).

The way this association deals with diverse groups calls for two comments. First, as no identity papers are required at the entrance of this drop-in centre, the "balanced mix" relies on the supposed origin of the persons. Hence, all black people speaking English are viewed as a single group, all North Africans as another. The paradox of this ethnic-based profiling – in relation to the objective of overcoming prejudices, stereotypes, and learning to live together – is evident, as it actually produces an ethnicisation of social relations within the institution ([2]). Second, through this management of a "diverse environment", social workers actually take on the task of teaching "living together", of educating clients about diversity; this runs counter to the philosophy of low-threshold reception, which is intended to be non-prescriptive and non-conditional.

The second case is about L'Entraide, the association that runs the two night shelters Le Balcon and Le Refuge. The term "balanced mix" is also used by the manager Nicolas Z. and the staff, as a rule that the institution has recently introduced in order to prevent any group from becoming predominant in terms of client numbers in the shelters. These structures have established their own criteria to manage the allocation of beds. The "priority" group is comprised of Swiss citizens (from any part of the country), and of foreigners with a renewable residence permit (B) or a permanent residence permit (C). These clients are entitled to beds in the shelter for consecutive nights for up to 3 months: they are then supposed to move out for at least one month. "Others" are entitled to 10 consecutive nights, as long as no priority group member requires a bed. According to Nicolas Z., over the years, the proportion of clients from the "priority" group has declined until they represented only 12% of the people requesting a place in the shelters. He interprets this disaffection, on the one hand, by a selfexclusion associated with a change in perception: the fact that large numbers of English-speaking sub-Saharan Africans were waiting every night at the shelters' doors could have led 'local' homeless people to think that this place was specifically meant for asylum seekers. On the other hand, these same 'local' clients may have felt threatened by the aggressiveness of the two dominant groups in the queue ("Nigerians" and "Roma"), in the context of a shortage of beds. An employee from the same group of shelters, a woman in her sixties with ten years of experience working in shelters, confirmed during an informal discussion that "we use this idea of a 'balanced mix', because when a group dominates from a numbers standpoint, it poses problems" (Suzane I., 11th September 2019). She then stated that "we say 'mix' to avoid talking about quotas". These quotas are actually that no more than 5 people from the same supposed community can obtain a bed on the same night. According to Nicolas Z., the proportion of people from the priority group has risen from 12 to 30% since this measure was introduced. In addition, according to him – and our observations tend to confirm this – each 'community' is now self-regulating, in the sense that no more than five people labelled as "Nigerians" or "Roma" appear simultaneously each evening at the entrance to the shelters.

This second case also shows how informal categories based on a supposed nationality or ethnicity are used by shelters' staff to regulate the population using their services. Such people processing based on stereotypes ([6]; [5]) is conceived and presented as a practical solution to a concrete problem. But it also has a performative effect on homeless people belonging to the alleged groups, who internalise these informal norms in their survival tactics.

This article aimed to show the ways in which social workers struggle to find a path between policy implementation and their direct interventions with homeless people. We have shown that the Swiss context is characterised by a political strategy not to take the homelessness phenomenon into consideration, denial of the homeless phenomenon, coupled with a lack of scientific data on the topic and undersized facilities. The fact that migrants frequently use these services is a consequence of the social construction of protection and exclusion through European and national laws on the movement of persons, immigration and asylum, reflecting the ever-increasing discrimination between documented and undocumented people ([9]).

This context generates difficult working conditions for social workers, who express feelings of powerlessness, particularly due to the chronic lack of resources that leads their institutions either to reject people from their services or to offer unworthy services. Informed by Lipsky's perspective on street-level bureaucrats, the article aimed precisely at understanding how social workers negotiate the practical and ethical dilemmas they face in the accomplishment of their tasks: managing the shortage, i.e. how they decide on the eligibility of people in a context of demand outstripping supply, and dealing with large numbers of heterogenous people with different needs.

Our ethnographic study has led us to identify a series of strategies developed to solve these dilemmas. Category-based containment practices are put in place by institutions to restrict the unconditional nature of access in a context of shortages of resources. These practices aim at limiting the number of beneficiaries through a definition of the legitimate user of emergency homeless services, a definition that varies from place to place and without consensus. However, when social workers attempt to gain more leeway to accommodate this containment system, they are faced both by the shortage of resources and by the heterogeneity of the population they accommodate. They develop their own "people-processing" criteria ([6]), based on the supposed belonging community of homeless people, to manage the access to the services or to accommodate them within the facilities. We highlighted the pitfalls of profiling people in a context of diverse client groups with differentiated needs and examined the ways in which front-line workers cobble together rather unsatisfactory practical solutions to manage this diversity through the notion of "balanced mix". These "bricolages" bring about their own contradictions in the implementation of aid by social workers, who are well aware of them and that contribute to the feeling of powerlessness expressed by several of our interviewees. However, these field workers create implementation policies that have their own reality.