The Production of Precarity in Denmark's Asylum Regime.

The special issue discusses the intersections between social welfare and migration control, as well as how stratified access to welfare services is used to govern 'unwanted' groups. This article explores these intersections in Denmark' deterrence-oriented asylum policy regime, analysing the discourses and practices whereby people seeking protection are constructed as 'undeserving' poor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in different sites of enforcement of Denmark's asylum regime as well as interviews with street-level workers and people who sought asylum in Denmark, I trace how the Danish deterrence approach operates through the production of poverty and precarity among people seeking protection in asylum reception camps, deportation-oriented integration programmes, and finally, deportation camps. I show how the Danish welfare state, as a result of the merging of external and internal bordering practices, produces a condition of precarity and (non)deportability that extends from the asylum camps to those awarded temporary protection status. Hence, while the deterrence-oriented Danish policy regime has not proven 'effective' from the point of view of immigration control, it has served to reinforced a dualised, hierarchically ordered welfare rights' regime that gradually erodes the rights and life opportunities of unwanted noncitizen 'others'.

Keywords: Asylum; precarity; welfare nationalism; Denmark; asylum camps; deportation

This special issue discusses the intersections between social welfare and migration control, as well as how limited access to welfare services is used as a technique for governing 'unwanted' groups, including migrants, through poverty. Not all of those who move – whether to seek protection or to enhance their life opportunities – are poor. Yet in public and political discourse, the figure of the poor, 'economic' migrant, who seeks access to welfare benefits rather than refuge from political and structural violence, is instrumentalised to portray migrants as undeserving ([6]). While the classification of people as 'economic' and 'political' migrants collapse into each other in practice, these discourses are instrumentalised by policy-makers who seek to limit and stratify access to social welfare provisions and labour markets for people seeking protection, hence effectively producing them as poor ([3]).

In this article, I trace how the figure of the 'poor economic migrant' circulates and informs policy implementation in the Danish asylum system. With an asylum regime that has long been marked by restrictive entry policies and stratified access to social rights for noncitizens, Denmark represents a case of a welfare state with strong external and internal bordering against undesired 'others' ([12]). Over the past two decades, government coalitions spanning across the political spectrum have introduced series of restrictions into the country's asylum and so-called integration policy, which have circumscribed the possibilities for people seeking protection to legalise their stay, to bring their families to Denmark, and to access social welfare. This deterrenceoriented policy approach to people seeking protection has been justified by welfare chauvinist, nativist discourses that portray asylum immigration as a treat to the culture, welfare and security of Danish society ([44]). The policy regime was arguably consolidated by the previous, liberal-conservative government who, after having introduced more than 100 restrictions to the Alien's Act between 2015-19, announced a 'paradigm shift' whereby protection holders should no longer be included in society but deported to the countries they fled from as soon as possible ([20]). The incumbent Social Democrat government that came into power in 2019 have vowed to maintain this restrictive approach.

In this article, I analyse how the deterrence-oriented asylum regime and the internal bordering practices it exemplifies is enacted through the distinctive parts of the Danish immigration and welfare bureaucracies that are responsible for the provision of basic social welfare for people seeking protection in the different stages of the asylum process. For this purpose, I adopt a practiceoriented research approach, which focuses on how policies are interpreted and enacted by the frontline workers (Borrelli/Trasciani 2019) working in the fields of asylum reception, integration and deportation, and how they affect people seeking or holding protection status. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in asylum and deportation centres, interviews with non-governmental organisations, social workers and people seeking protection in Denmark, and deskbased research, the article traces how the Danish asylum regime constructs people seeking protection as undesired and undeserving poor. The agents of enforcement and the people at the sharp end of those policy changes are thus the main protagonists in this article. Their lived experiences, discourses and practices permit me to analyse how the external and internal bordering practices of the Danish welfare state merge and operate and with what effects. The article is thus about the 'precarious inclusion' of people seeking protection ([53]), on the one hand, and about how welfare bureaucracies sustain and reproduce inequality ([2]), on the other.

The use of mobility controls and welfare policies to regulate 'unwanted' populations are well established technologies of statecraft ([3]). These governing techniques range from policies that produce precarity and social marginalisation (see Atzmüller et al. and Lanfranconi et al., this issue), to incarceration and expulsion ([61]). Through such measures, states are able to assert spatial and social boundaries between citizens and 'others', and produce categorical distinctions between those deserving and undeserving of state support. These boundaries are classed, racialised and gendered: it is, for instance, not anybody's mobility but in particular the mobility of the racialised poor that is conceived as problematic in the first place ([50]). Although far from all those who migrate to seek protection or better life opportunities are poor, narratives of wealthy states being 'overburdened' by the arrival of impoverished people seeking protection have proven instrumental to create moral panics ([18]) over uncontrolled immigration, as well as to justify the reinforcement of border controls and the reification of internal borders that limitaccess to social and political rights for noncitizens ([59]). The term 'bordering' therefore encompasses spatial control techniques as well as the legal, administrative and social processes that assign noncitizens to 'different legal, political and symbolic spaces' ([50]: 183). This definition enables an analysis of how stratified access to social welfare – including access to housing, social aid, education, work, and healthcare – are used as complementary tools to physical border controls in the regulation of mobility (Bommes/Geddes 2000; [13]).

Research on the internal bordering processes of welfare states has identified two complementary driving forces that underpin and justify the stratification of social rights between citizens and noncitizens: welfare nationalism and neoliberal capitalism, respectively. I will discuss the two in turn. Firstly, limiting access to welfare for migrants has proven instrumental in states' nationalist, identity-making projects. The welfare state has always produced categories of undesired others, be they the homeless, the mentally or physically disabled or minority groups, who have been subjected to spatial and social control techniques ([4]). Yet mobile noncitizens who are racialised as 'migrants' have become the primary targets of nativist, nation-building political projects that seek to assert delineations between citizens and 'others' ([7]; [36]). Indeed, 'immigration emerges as a site for racial and racist discourse, and as a site of conjuncture between the welfare state and its citizens' ([30]: 45). Yet due to their self-image as anti-racist, egalitarian and inclusive states, these racist underpinnings of the welfare state ideology and practice have been difficult to name and contest ([43]). Still, the racialised boundaries of welfarism are evident in policy debates. Migrants have been disproportionately affected by the welfare retrenchments that have occurred across several European states since the 1990s ([54]), and people with migrant status are regularly portrayed as the most 'undeserving' of welfare benefits (van [48]) – a perception that has been instrumentalised and fuelled by far-right as well as social democrat political parties pushing a nationalist agenda. This welfare chauvinism ([36]), which also connects migrants' poverty to perceptions about their cultural identity, has justified cuts in social security provisions and the introduction of rules of conditionality and activation that compel migrants to 'prove' their willingness to work (Emmenegger/[14]). While welfare conditionality also applies to poor citizens, the 'dualisation' of the welfare state has come to exclude people immigrated from poorer countries – notably from the Global South – from social security systems and the labour market (Emmenegger/[14]).

Migrants and their descendants are thus exposed to poverty and precarity as a direct result of policies aimed at excluding them from the rights afforded to citizens. This differentiation not only serves nationalist projects, but also a neoliberal agenda, as migrants provide states with cheap and exploitable labour (Emmenegger/[14]). The political economy of neoliberal globalisation is thus the second reason why the subordinate inclusion ([45]) of migrants in welfare states is politically instrumental: the structural vulnerability of migrants, which is a direct result of their exclusion from social service provisions and citizenship rights, is exactly what renders them valuable as an exploitable 'reserve army of labour' ([55]). What keeps noncitizens particularly vulnerable to exploitation is their deportability ([22]); as formulated by Emmenegger and Careja (2012: 124), 'if nonimmigrant cheap labor risks precariousness, much immigrant cheap labor risks precariousness and expulsion'. Moreover, while migrant workers have long provided public and private employers with flexible labour, researchers have noted that low-paid, low-skilled labour is increasingly performed by people seeking or holding international protection, a process referred to as the 'refugeeization of the workforce' ([24]; [49]). As the moral economy of humanitarianism underpinning the global refugee regime merges with the interests of capitalism, recipients of humanitarian protection are being transformed into exploitable workers, whose economic and physical and social survival is rendered conditional upon their sustained exploitability ([49]).

People who have migrated to seek protection or better life chances thus find themselves at the sharp end of these two intersecting logics: on the one hand, they are targets of nativist and welfare chauvinist policies, which excludes them from social safety nets. On the other hand, and as a result, they are compelled to render themselves available as exploitable workers to secure their economic survival and continued legal residency. [53]; see also [35]) use 'precarious inclusion' to describe this condition of having limited access to social rights while being vulnerable to exploitation as a direct result of the intersection of migration control and social welfare regulation. This article explores how precarious inclusion is produced in the Danish asylum regime. The article is thus simultaneously about how people seeking protection are governed through poverty, and about the (re)articulations of the welfare state: rather than considering 'the state' as a unified actor, I consider the welfare state – as an idea and material fact – to be continuously constructed through the interactions between frontline workers and the (non)citizens standing before it (Lindberg/[11]).

Nordic welfare states have traditionally been known for combining restrictive admission requirements with relatively inclusive welfare provisions for migrants ([59]). However, compared to its neighbouring states, Denmark has a long-standing reputation for combining harsh immigration laws with stratified and limited access to social rights for people seeking protection as well as for newcomers ([12]). The Danish Alien's Act, introduced in 1983, was originally praised for its 'humane' approach to people seeking protection, yet it has since been subjected to frequent and substantial revisions, many of which have been explicitly designed to minimise so-called pull factors for prospective migrants ([65]) by imposing harsher conditions for those already present on the territory. Asylum immigration became politicised in the late 1980s and the 1990s, when Denmark saw an increase in the number of people arriving to seek protection, including from the war in former Yugoslavia ([12]). In 1995, the right-wing populist Danish People's Party was founded, which pushed an Islamophobic and anti-immigrant agenda and succeeded in placing immigration at the centre of electoral campaigns. Asylum immigration was framed as a threat against national security, on the one hand, and against the welfare state, on the other. In the years to come, both social democratic and centre-liberal government coalitions initiated restrictive legislative changes to Danish asylum law in view of minimising the 'pull-factors' for to-be-migrants ([37]).

The 2000s saw continuous restrictive amendments to the Alien's Act and a deterrence-oriented asylum policy regime, which served to discourage and exclude those applying for asylum from entering into society until they had proved themselves 'deserving' of state protection, gradually became consolidated (ibid.). The trend continued into the 2010s, with shifting governments making it among its 'central policy objectives' to reduce the number of people seeking protection in Denmark ([64]: 149). Therefore, when the liberalconservative government in power during the long summer of migration in 2015 declared their aim to make it 'significantly less attractive to seek asylum in Denmark' (quoted in [34]), their statement was not so much a novelty as it was inscribed into a longer history of deterrence. What was arguably novel with the more than 100 restrictive amendments (stramninger) to the Alien's Act adopted since 2015, which culminated in the declaration of the so-called paradigm shift in Denmark's asylum policy regime, was their explicit intent to the very 'edge' of or even breach human rights conventions ([17]).

If Denmark's deterrence-oriented asylum policy has been designed to prevent people from arriving to and remaining in the country in the first place, Danish integration law has served as a complementary tool for making migrants' presence in the country strictly conditional. Denmark's first Integration Act was adopted in 1999. The law included provisions for preventing 'welfare abuse' by noncitizens ([12]) and for regulating the perceived cultural 'otherness' and inferiority of Muslim migrants in particular ([47]). Mikkel [52] has highlighted how the very Danish concept of 'integration' entails a particular, racialised social imaginary, in which immigrant minorities – and Muslims in particular ([1]) – are problematised as inferior and suspected for their 'archaic, unhealthy and un-Danish practices' ([52]: 683) in the sphere of family life, gender roles, values, daily habits, religion and tradition. This imaginary has justified dispersal policies (in order to prevent so-called parallel societies) and interventionist social programmes, bureaucratic control and surveillance, designed to 'correct' their cultural practices. Moreover, the notion of 'integration' is built around classed and gendered figures, where (poor) immigrants are depicted as freeloaders, amoral, and unwilling to work – a figure that is contrasted to the economically productive Danish citizen, who 'contributes' to the welfare state. Foreign nationals and racialised minorities of 'non-Western background' (an administrative category that is racialised and classed; see [10]) are regularly presented as threats to the nativist Danish welfare model – ironically because of their poverty. This also illustrates the centrality of the welfare state ideology to Danish nationalist identity-building ([44]), which remains in place even as welfare provisions have gradually been conditioned under a neoliberal governance paradigm ever since the 1990s onwards ([8]). This has not only affected people of migrant background, but also poor and unemployed citizens have been subjected to activation programmes and welfare conditionality. Yet, there are crucial differences in the kind of precarity experienced by a long-term unemployed Danish citizen and a noncitizen who remains at risk of deportation to a country they have fled from ([53]).

Indeed, deportability has recently come to occupy a central role in Denmark's asylum and integration policy regimes. In 2018, the liberal-conservative government, supported by the nationalist, right-wing Danish People's Party, officially declared a shift in the focus of Danish asylum policy 'from integration to deportation' ([20]: 5). The so-called paradigm shift (paradigmskiftet, L 140) was announced as part of the 2019 Financial Plan. It states that people who have obtained protection status are no longer to be 'integrated' but deported to their countries of origin as soon as legally permissible under human rights law. The laws permitting this shift were introduced already in 2015, when the Social Democratic government reduced protection permits from 5–7 years to 1–2 years, adding an article (19 § 1) that permitted the revocation of protection statuses at the sign of the slightest improvement in protection holders' countries of origin. According to L 140, protection statuses will automatically be reassessed and withdrawn as soon as the situation in their country of origin has improved enough to permit deportation without violating the nonrefoulement principle ([16]). Yet, under the paradigm shift, 'return' options should be discussed already from the moment people arrive to seek protection in Denmark. The so-called integration programmes are also exchanged for 'return programmes', and integration benefits have been renamed 'self-sustenance and repatriation benefits' ([20]). As the above overview has shown, this is arguably less of a paradigm shift than a consolidation of the deterrence-based Danish asylum regime. Yet authorities' focus on deportations has caused significant anxiety among protection holders and resulted in the revocation of protection for hundreds of people: most of them Somali nationals who have spent several years in Denmark, but also Syrian nationals who have been ordered to return to a still war-torn country ([21]). The renewed emphasis on deportation – also manifested in the Social Democratic government's launch of a new Return Agency (Hjemrejsestyrelsen) in 2020 – implies that more protection holders are at risk of deportation or of being moved to deportation camps if their departure cannot be instantly enforced, or if they refuse to 'cooperate' with authorities in the deportation process. The long-term implications of this deportation-oriented asylum and integration regimes – which appears as a contradiction in terms – are yet to be evaluated. This article aims to shed light on the factors that make the restrictive regime possible and some of its implications.

The article builds on ethnographically inspired and qualitative research conducted in different 'sites of enforcement' ([45]) of Denmark's asylum regime between 2016 and 2020. Rather than focusing on political discourse and policy analysis, the article takes on a practice-oriented approach that focuses on how policies are interpreted and enforced in practice ([25]). This approach of 'studying through' policies allows the research to 'uncover the constellations of actors, activities, and influences that shape policy decisions, their implementation, and their results' ([62]: 30). The combination of interviews and observation studies allowed me to gain a 'thick' understanding of how the Danish asylum regime operates in practice. Drawing on implementation studies, this article focuses principally on the street-level actors ([42]) involved in implementing policies related to the asylum and migration control process. In the case of the Danish asylum system, these include bureaucrats employed by the state, but also NGO workers operating on state contracts. Throughout the article, I therefore refer to them all as streetlevel workers (see Borrelli/Trasciani 2019).

This article draws on semi-structured interviews and participant observation conducted with state officials and NGO staff working in one asylum reception centre and one so-called departure centre in Denmark in 2016. I spent one month in each centre, following staff in their everyday work and observing their interactions with each other and with residents. I also held informal interviews with them about how their work and role in the Danish asylum system. Nine complementary interviews were conducted with social workers and representatives of human rights organisations and NGOs working in the asylum reception and integration policy fields. In the case of the integration programmes, there was more information available in reports and prior research, and this empirical part of the article therefore relies primarily on analysis of secondary sources. The article is also informed by continuous conversations with people who sought protection in Denmark in the time period 2016–2020. Their lived experiences of the Danish asylum system have provided them with unique, situated knowledge of the structures and processes of power at play ([29]) and their expertise has informed the analysis of the policies underpinning this article. Finally, I have drawn on prior research, media news articles, and reports by human rights organisations and NGOs to enrich the material and to cross-check findings.

Using the theme of this special issue as a starting point – namely, how people seeking protection are governed through differential access to social welfare – I conducted a data analysis of the different sources with a special focus on material relating to this theme. The quotations and fieldnotes that appear in the material have been selected on this basis. Importantly, the quotations do not represent the totality of the opinions and practices of my research participants; instead, they illustrate some of the ways in which people seeking protection were discursively and materially constructed as poor and underserving under Denmark's deterrence-oriented asylum regime. Similarly, I do not claim to represent a generalised understanding of the experiences of people seeking protection in Denmark. This is in part related to my own privileged position and lack of situated knowledge; and in part to the complexity of factors structuring individual experiences. Yet I have summarised recurring themes in the articulations of experiences offered by people seeking protection.

The Danish asylum reception system builds on a model of encampment. Upon arrival in Denmark, people seeking protection are placed in asylum camps while the Immigration Service (and, in the case of a negative decision, the Refugee Appeals' Board) process their asylum application. The length of their stay might range from a few weeks to several years ([13]). Like in many other European countries, the Danish asylum camps are dispersed in rural districts and often from the major cities where people have their social and economic life ([64]). The camps are either run by municipalities or by the Danish Red Cross. They provide basic welfare services to residents – including accommodation, catering and emergency health services, and kindergartens for children – and offer so-called activation programmes, where residents can partake in low-skilled jobs or limited educational activities to top up their daily allowance or 'pocket money' (53,40 DKK per day for single adults, according to [46]). Residents are not permitted to study within higher education and need special permission from the Immigration Service to work outside of the camps.

The asylum camps are thus supposed to provide minimum welfare services to people seeking protection while keeping them separated from society, as to prevent their 'unwanted integration' in case they will receive a negative decision and be ordered to leave Denmark ([57]). Meanwhile, they are to be fostered into self-governing, economically responsible individuals who can serve the needs of the Danish labour market, should they be permitted to remain ([57]). The asylum reception camp where I conducted onemonth full-time ethnographic research in 2016 is one of Denmark's largest asylum camps. Located former military barracks, it has the capacity to accommodate around 5–600 people, including families with children, single men and women, and people with special needs. The length of residents' stay in the camp varied greatly: some were moved within days to other accommodation camps, where they remained until their asylum application has been processed, while others remained throughout the asylum procedure, which could last for a few months or take several years. The camp is run by the Danish Red Cross, who are contracted by the Danish state to care for daily maintenance, care and 'activation' of residents. Despite their close affiliation with state authorities, Red Cross workers insisted on their role as 'humanitarians' of the Danish asylum system (see also [39]). This attitude had not changed, even as Danish asylum policy had moved in the direction of further restrictions; on the contrary, staff maintained that more restrictive policies only increased the need for a 'humanitarian watchdog' that would safeguard the interests of people seeking protection. Hans , a middle-aged Red Cross worker and manager of the reception camp, explained:

This job is really about making a difference. For the people who have fled, who come from chaos and persecution, to be the one saying, 'Hi, you are welcome here'. We are the ones giving them a place to sleep, something to eat – the basic things for people. I think this is extremely rewarding.

Hans' understanding of the function and role of the asylum camps was one of hospitality, not deterrence. In this, he was not alone: most Red Cross workers saw their work as inherently humanitarian, and often shared stories of 'rewarding' moments, when they had been able to console and support people who had suffered 'chaos and persecution'. Yet their role as humanitarians necessitated a perception of people seeking protection as humanitarian victims in need of the aid, comfort and material support they could offer. It therefore sparked discomfort and concern among staff whenever they suspected that they were contributing to providing welfare support – however minimal – to individuals who were undeserving of protection and 'only had come to Denmark for profit'. One senior Red Cross worker, Sasja, explained to me how he had learnt to distinguish between 'deserving refugees', on the one hand, and 'undeserving economic migrants', on the other ([19]), based on his intuition:

You rely on your gut feeling. You learn to distinguish between genuine and bogus asylum seekers. Like Romanians, Russians, Ukrainians... they arrive here only to steal. People who are really here to seek protection would not do that; they don't come here to get rich. You rely on their country of origin to determine this... but also their behaviour and how they interact with others. There was a woman who came here to seek asylum, then she disappeared, but she came back when she was pregnant because otherwise she wouldn't have access to public healthcare. She gave birth to the baby, then she disappeared again. And a few years later she re-appeared and did the same thing. So, I called the Immigration Service and they agreed with me that it was obvious that it was because her husband couldn't afford paying for healthcare and they thought they could do it at the public's expense. She was rejected by the Immigration Service immediately.

Sasja here suggests that a woman's efforts to secure essential healthcare for her birth giving was 'evidence' that she was a 'bogus asylum seeker' who intended to 'get rich' on Danish welfare. The legal status of her husband was unknown, yet the family's assumed destitution was enough for Sasja to determine that her asylum claim was fraudulent. Sasja held limited information about the case at hand, and instead relied on his 'gut feeling', which told him that a poor migrant could not possibly be a 'true refugee'. The quotation also exposes the heteronormative, gendered stereotypes at play: the woman was assumed to rely on a breadwinner male partner who was unable and unwilling to provide for the family. Finally, Sasja does not recognise how such a reliance might be an expression of the particular constraints and risks facing women who reside in Danish asylum camps ([13]).

Several Red Cross workers expressed similarly strong, emotional reactions to cases of alleged abuse of the asylum system by people who did not qualify for protection status. Emely, a junior Red Cross worker, admitted that she considered disability, old age or poor health to be suspicious indicators of 'bogus' asylum claims.

It's obvious that they are not persecuted. Instead, they dump the old or disabled family members here when they can't be bothered to care for them anymore. And here they get care and money, that's easier for the family... it costs us a lot to keep them here as well. So, I think they bring them here because they don't want to care for them.

Emely's remark reflects a flawed understanding of the legal grounds for protection, where disability and poor health under certain circumstances can qualify a person for humanitarian protection under 9 § b stk. 1 of the Alien's Act. A person with disabilities can also very well fulfil the legal conditions for convention status. Moreover, it suggests a moralising connection between poverty, disability, and welfare abuse. While both Sasja and Emely emphasised that excluding those 'undeserving' of protection was a necessity to keep the system solvent for those deemed 'deserving', their statements are in line with a welfare chauvinism ([25]) that propagates limiting access to welfare to anyone conceived as an outsider to the racially bounded community of (ablebodied), productive citizens. Moreover, suspicions of welfare abuse were regularly connected with suspected criminality. Gert, who had worked in the Red Cross camp for some years, told me,

You come here because you believe you can make a difference, but you learn how to shut off after a while. Even though my sense of fairness is challenged here... you see young asylum seekers coming here with brand new clothes, shoes, expensive things... and you know they did not get them in a legal way.

According to Gert's line of reasoning – which partly contradicts that of his colleagues – 'true' refugees should be poor and, as such, available for humanitarian 'rescue'. If they dressed or behaved in a way that suggested they were not, they might be criminal.

How far do these narratives correspond with the lived realities of people residing in the camps? In practice, even though essential services, including shelter and food, are provided in the camp, staying in the Danish asylum camps can hardly be considered profitable: on the contrary, the camps circumscribe residents' autonomy, infringe upon their integrity, and expose them to protracted poverty-related and other harms ([28]). The 'pocket money' that residents receive is insufficient to cover basic needs for residents, in particular if they wish to lead a life outside the centre. As [13] has highlighted, the pocket money is, for instance, insufficient to buy a bus or train ticket to the city centre, prompting residents of the camps to travel on public transport without a required ticket if they wish to visit friends or family outside the camp. Leading a life outside the camps thus entails a risk of criminalisation – or exploitation. Some Red Cross staff members acknowledged how the camps circumscribed the autonomy of residents. Karen, for instance, reflected: 'Imagine that you cannot even decide what or when to eat... to not be able to feed your children when they are hungry. And as a child, to not be able to get food when you are hungry'. Karen here identifies some of the harmful implications of encampment for residents' mental health and their social and family life ([60]). Indeed, prior research has shown that these 'banal' regulations of the everyday, which force camp residents into dependence and idleness, are experienced as constraining and dehumanising ([13]; [28]). Even as some staff members made sincere efforts to render residents' stay in the camps 'meaningful', they remained, as Hans, the camp director, remarked, 'a parking lot for asylum seekers while they are waiting'.

The legal classification of people seeking protection into categories of 'deserving refugees' and 'undeserving migrants' (often suspected of having economic incentives for migrating (see [10]; Danaj and Wagner, this journal's next issue)) ultimately takes place at the Immigration Service. However, the asylum camps are also important sites where the moral and political classifications of people into deserving and undeserving are configured. The above section has shown some of the ways in which people seeking protection are constructed as vulnerable subjects of humanitarian intervention or as suspicious welfare abusers and criminals, respectively. Meanwhile, life in the camps exposes residents to conditions of poverty, constrained autonomy, spatial isolation and risks of criminalisation. Research and reports from human rights organisation have time and again highlighted the damaging effects of the camps on the health and wellbeing of residents ([13]; [57]; [28]; [60]; [63]). Supposedly, this condition would change for those who obtain protection status, yet there are several indications that the camp-like conditions now extend beyond the camps to those holding temporary protection status under Denmark's restrictive and deportation-oriented 'integration' regime.

When we moved [from the asylum camp] into the municipality (kommune), it was like a camp as well (...) we had a miserable situation there. You had to clean a specific part of the place within a specific period of time. I had to clean one of the toilets. And if they [officials from the municipality] come to check and it's not clean, they give you a fee of 500 Danish kronor. And you cannot move out of these camp places as long as you are on social aid (kontanthjælp), because your salary is too low.

Mohamed arrived in Denmark in 2015 and obtained a three-year residence permit and refugee status after having spent a year and a half in an asylum camp. When he moved out of the camp with his family, they were placed in temporary accommodation in a different municipality than they had asked for. Mohamed highlights how his first accommodation in Denmark reminded him of the camp, both in terms of its material standards and the continuous monitoring by officials they were subjected to. His observations echo those of Syppli Kohl and colleagues ([58]), who have documented how camp-like conditions are spreading 'from asylum centres to the rest of society' for newly settled protection holders. According to new rules introduced in 2018, municipalities are only obliged to provide people with protection status with temporary housing that needs to be covered by their self-sufficiency and repatriation benefit, which amounts to around 6 000 DKK per month – half the amount that Danish citizens on social benefits receive. People receiving these benefits are also excluded from unemployment insurance, child benefits, and old-age pension, which they only gain access to with time ([15]). Municipalities are therefore compelled to use former welfare institutions of very low standards – which are often similar to asylum camp facilities. What is more, and as will be detailed in this section, people holding temporary protection status often continue to experience poverty, precarity, and temporariness as they seek to navigate Denmark's 'deportation-oriented' integration regime.

If a person is granted protection status, they will be resettled in one of Denmark's 98 municipalities, which are responsible for providing them with accommodation and supporting them in finding work, learning Danish, and 'integrating' into Danish society. As Mohamed's story reveals, people are not able to choose where in the country they will settle. Upon arrival, they have to sign a 'self-sufficiency and repatriation contract' (formerly integration contract), and commit themselves to 'ensure self-sufficiency for myself and for my resident children and spouse/cohabitant, as well as active participation and contribution to Danish society' (UIM n.d.), and subscribe to 'Danish values', including 'its democratic principles' and 'gender equality' (ibid.). They also have to sign that they accept that their protection status will be withdrawn if conditions improve in the country they fled from. To remind protection holders of the temporariness of their stay in Denmark, social workers in municipalities are supposed to hold regular so-called repatriation dialogues and discuss their prospects of returning to their country of origin; a practice that a social worker I interviewed dismissed as 'complete nonsense'.

Protection holders are also enrolled in programmes that include language training and internships, which are meant to ensure that they 'work from day one' ([53]: 4). This work-fare norm is similar for unemployed Danish citizens, who are also expected to partake in activation programmes and internships as part of their 'integration' into the labour market. Yet, for people holding temporary protection status, research has shown that these internship programmes, while enhancing participants' short-term participation in the labour market, have been less successful in supporting participants to find paid work in the medium to long term ([5]). Instead, people have become trapped in unpaid labour in low-skilled job sectors such as supermarkets, franchise restaurants and industries, for years ([27]; [66]). Critics have highlighted how the internship programmes contribute to institutionalising low-paid labour, as they allow people with protection status to be employed with lower salaries and under more precarious conditions compared to Danish workers (Wulff/Feil 2019; [53]).

Mohamed partook in the municipality-run compulsory internship programme, and, like many others, he struggled to make ends meet on the selfsustenance and repatriation benefit. In contrast, Mohamed noted, his labour was highly profitable for employers in low-skilled work sectors, who benefited from his free labour:

The internships are useless, because they never give you a job. After three months you finish and start a new one. They send us to the big supermarkets: Netto, Fakta, Føtex, because they always need workers. They send 20 people to McDonald's but only three of them get a paid job in the end and the rest have to try another internship. Some stay for more than nine months with no job, others get it after one month (...). This time is not counted as work time, but as time where you got money from the country. So, you would be working for nine months and it's not counted as a real job. It also affects you, because you are not free to do what you want but are under the mercy of the municipality.

Mohamed is not alone in noting how people with protection status have become a valuable labour force for private employers. In their study of how Afghan protection holders navigate the Danish asylum regime, [53] cite a research participant who, like Mohamed, suggested that the integration programme was designed to provide employers with 'workers for free'. Moreover, in Wulff and Feil's (2019) study of labour market participation among people holding protection status in Denmark, an owner of a private industry admits: 'I don't have any Danes who apply here. It's rare that I have anyone who applies. They know very well that this is industrial labour. And no Danes want to put up with that' (Wulff/Feil 2019: para 3, author's translation). The industry owner's comment shows how the dualisation of the labour market is structured along the lines of citizenship, where noncitizens are pushed into taking on low-skilled, unpopular jobs ([27]). These inequalities are also gendered, and they negatively affect those who for various reasons experience are limited in their capacity to participate in the labour market. Henriette, a social worker I interviewed, noted that when 'women get discriminated [against] in the labour market, we assume they have to work in the care sector, while a man is expected to be able to take up a job anywhere'. Henriette also mentioned how the expectation of full-time work and emphasis on sanctions further placed unrealistic demands on people having learning difficulties, trauma, and psychological and physical disabilities.

Meanwhile, people holding protection status are exposed to poverty. Already when the self-sustenance and repatriation benefit was lowered in 2015, researchers warned that it would push people holding protection status into absolute poverty and create a 'new underclass' in Denmark ([31]). In their evaluation of the benefit policy, the Danish Institute for Human Rights ([23]) found that many of the families living on what was then still called integration benefits struggled to cover basic needs, including food and medicine. Poverty prevented them from engaging with the surrounding society, resulting in social marginalisation and isolation. DIHR concluded that the policy constituted a breach with the Danish constitution, which obliges the state to ensure that residents have access to minimum means of existence.

The Danish government has made clear that the aim is no longer that protection status holders will 'integrate' into society, but that they leave Denmark as soon as it is legally permissible for authorities to deport them to the countries they fled from. The term 'precarious inclusion' ([53]) captures well the condition of uncertainty, temporariness, poverty and exposure to exploitation that temporary protection status holders are exposed to under this policy regime, where the threat of deportation both disciplines, marginalizes, and renders life for protection holders uncertain. A Syrian man with protection status told the [23]: 'We are just sitting around waiting for decisions, and the municipality decides, so that puts pressure on us (...). They regulate us and our entire lives' ([23]: 87, author's translation). Similar to this man, Mohamed also explained how he felt 'unfree', even as he obtained his protection status and left the asylum camp. He was forced to continue to rely on the municipality for (limited) financial support and on the low-skilled, unpaid internships. Since his labour was unrecognised, his prospects for prolonging his legal residency was uncertain, since having a salaried job and paying taxes are among the conditions for obtaining permanent residency. As noted by the social worker, Henriette, the situation is arguably even more precarious for women, elderly, disabled and traumatised persons – who are also more likely to hold subsidiary protection status – rendered vulnerable to poverty and eventually deportation, as they are even less likely to find work that fulfils the conditions for prolonged or even permanent residence status. Hence, people holding temporary protection status in Denmark continue to be exposed to conditions that resemble the asylum camps (Syppli-Kohl et al. 2019), including poverty, temporariness and uncertainty. The final empirical section deals with the protracted deportability that is central to maintaining this precarious condition.

There is a strong signal that deportation should be prioritised over integration, and this is what we have to adapt to. Or, it might be a bit strong to say that deportation should be prioritised over integration. But it is, at the very least, a strong political demand that we should enforce deportations as quickly as possible.

The above quotation by a senior Danish police officer tasked with enforcing the deportation of people whose asylum applications have been rejected is drawn from an interview that took place in 2016, two years before the former liberal government declared the so-called paradigm shift. As the police officer suggests, 'returning' rather than 'integrating' undesired migrants had been a political priority for some years already. In practice, however, far from all those whose asylum applications are rejected in the first place or who later lose their protection status in Denmark are able to leave.

If a person who applies for asylum in Denmark receives a negative decision – or has their temporary protection status reconsidered and withdrawn in accordance with the 'paradigm shift' – they will be ordered to move to one of Denmark's three deportation camps. The camps were inaugurated by the Social Democratic led coalition government in 2013 in view of restricting conditions for deportable persons and to 'send a very clear message' that they should leave Denmark (see [41]). The camps came into operation in 2015. Two of the three deportation camps are run by the Danish prison and probation service and hosted in military or old prison facilities; the third one, housing families with children, is run by the Danish Red Cross. All three are located in remote locations with limited or no access to public transportation. In the camps, residents receive limited or no daily allowance, and are not allowed to work, undertake internships or attend education. The camps have a catering arrangement, and residents are prohibited from cooking their own food, which is another measure to 'motivate' residents to leave by constraining their autonomy over their everyday lives. Residents are not de jure detained, but have to spend each night in the centre and regularly register with authorities with a frequency that for some of them amounts to twice per day. The camps thus constitute a form of de facto detainment that, in theory, can last for the rest of a person's life ([28]; Danish Helsinki Committee 2017). The camps have not fulfilled their declared aim of pressuring more deportable people to cooperate in their deportation process and leave Denmark; instead, they have rendered people stuck in social and spatial isolation, impoverishment and criminalisation ([28]).

However, the increased political emphasis on deportation is likely to result in more people being placed in deportation camps. In the past few years, the Danish immigration authorities have received an increased budget devoted to reassessing and, where possible, withdrawing residence permits for people with protection status, and authorities are under political pressure to reduce the number of people who are granted protection status ([17]). As a result, 1300 Somali nationals, including people holding refugee status and their family members, had their residence permits revoked in 2017–18. Some of them had spent years on temporary protection status in Denmark, and were now pressured to leave or would risk forced relocation to a deportation camp ([33]; [51]). However, many of them are neither willing nor able to return. Since Denmark has limited possibilities of forcibly deporting Somali nationals , they run the risk of spending long periods of time in deportation camps, or being pushed into illegality ([16]). The same situation applies to other groups, whose countries of origin have been declared 'safe' by the Danish government, including Afghanistan – and Syria. Syriannationals risk having their protection statuses withdrawn, even though the prospects that they are able to return to Syria are minimal – and the possibility of authorities to deport them by force inexistent. Hence, the politicised, deportation-oriented asylum policy regime is currently producing more rejections – but not necessarily more deportations. While the precarity and temporariness of people's legal residency proved useful to serve Danish employers with a flexible, underpaid labour force ([27]), those who end up living in deportation camps are pushed (back) into camp life, with the imposed idleness, isolation, deprivation of autonomy, and poverty-related harms this life entails.

The deportation camps serve a performative function for the Danish asylum regime, as they amplify the stigma of rejection and criminalisation of people who have been deemed undeserving of protection. When I conducted fieldwork in one of the camps, stigmatising and degrading discourses were reproduced by several staff members. Marie, one of the prison officers, remarked,

Here I see that refugees are not real refugees – take the Somalis, for instance, they just want a better life and not do anything here. You get, how should I put it... irritated. Sure, I have never been forced to flee myself but if it had been me... how can you be so ungrateful? They complain and say that everything is wrong here, but why did you then come here in the first place? Nobody asked you to come here. I'm not racist, but... I have become more critical since I started working here.

Marie's comment mirrors popular tropes of the 'undeserving' migrant being cunning, ungrateful welfare abusers ([6]). In addition to the blatant racism against Somali nationals, her accusation of them not 'doing anything' shows complete disregard for the fact that residents are barred from working, studying or making a life in Denmark. However, Lars, another prison officer working in the same camp, had a different understanding of the issue:

The residents have very negative attitudes. But maybe it's because they are stressed, and well, they don't have anything.... They have no private life, no money, no activities, and someone else decides what they should eat. They are just waiting to be sent off to somewhere else. So, the atmosphere is negative, everything is bad. They are effectively stuck in a no man's land.

Lars recognised that residents' attitudes and well-being were negatively affected by their stay in the camp, as well as from the lack of autonomy, and the indefinite time frame of their stay. Like asylum camps, the deportation camps have proved to have a drastic, negative impact on residents' physical and mental wellbeing ([28]). Residents have on several occasions contested the 'intolerable' conditions imposed upon them in the camps (Suárez-Krabbe/[40]) by organising series of protests against camp conditions, appealing to have their asylum cases reopened, and trying to make a life for themselves by maintaining contact with the surrounding society. They have also challenged the ways in which camp rules circumscribe their lives, by cooking for themselves, defying their duty to regularly register in the camps, or taking up work in the informal labour market. Many chose to leave Denmark and try to re-apply for protection elsewhere in Europe; a few of them have been able to improve their legal situation and find legal ways to remain in Denmark. Yet many are left in a limbo-like condition, as a direct result of the ways in which the internal and external bordering practices of the Danish welfare state intersect and consolidate around their precarious, liminal inclusion.

This article has analysed how the Danish deterrence-based asylum regime operates through constructing people seeking protection in Denmark as poor and undeserving, while also subjecting them to policies that aggravate their poverty, precarity, and marginalisation. Studying the three stages of the asylum process together enabled me to analyse the continuities in how people seeking protection are kept in a state of precarious inclusion ([53]) in the asylum camps, in the so-called repatriation programmes, and in deportation camps, where many risk becoming stuck for long periods of time in case their deportation order cannot be enforced. Tracing how similar conditions of social rights' restrictions, protracted uncertainty, and deportability characterise the condition of people undergoing these different processes allowed for an analysis of the proliferation of precarious 'in-between spaces' produced by restrictive asylum policies, how they are rationalised by practitioners in the field, and experienced by the people subjected to them.

These in-between spaces serve the interests of nativist, welfare chauvinist political projects as well as neoliberal markets. Racist and welfare chauvinist imaginaries are drawn upon to rationalise policies that effectively render people seeking or holding temporary protection status poor and precarious. Meanwhile, their exploitability enables states to fill labour market needs without offering corresponding access to rights or citizenship ([27]). While there are important similarities between the conditions of poor and unemployed citizens and noncitizens on the labour market ([3]) – 'activation' programmes and welfare conditionality are also used to 'govern the poor' among citizens ([32]) – this article has also shown how noncitizens' continued deportability is central for upholding their exploitation (Emmenegger/[14]). In this regard, Denmark follows a trend that has been observed in several countries, notably in Southern Europe, where we are witnessing a 'refugeeization of the workforce' ([24]), where protection holders rely on their productive labour to have their legal status prolonged. This results in a conflation of vulnerability- and performance-based deservingness ([6]) that risks jeopardising the legal status, in particular of women (who are more likely to hold subsidiary protection status) and people with physical disabilities or psychological traumas (who are likely to be disadvantaged on the labour market). Rather than being idiosyncratic in a welfare state context, the dualised labour market and social rights regime for citizens and non-citizens serve to reify a nativist, welfare chauvinist understanding of who 'deserves' to be included in society by positing their poverty as a cultural rather than structural characteristic ([10]).

While the deterrence-based Danish asylum regime has not proved 'effective' from the point of view of immigration control, it has contributed to creating a hierarchical, racially ordered rights regime where people who seek or have been granted asylum are exposed to exploitation, poverty, and associated harms. Instead of providing protection, the Danish asylum system produces novel vulnerabilities ([13]) that are in turn instrumentalised to portray people seeking protection as responsible for their own poverty and, as such, a threat to the welfare state (Borrelli and Bochsler, editorial of this issue). As has been pointed out in recent scholarly work, the dualisation of the welfare state and labour market not only jeopardises the rights of people with precarious migration status but also adds to the general hollowing out of social safety nets and deterioration of labour relations ([27]). The long-term implications of these trends will need to be continuously monitored, assessed and addressed in future research.

This research was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 188255). I wish to thank Lisa Marie Borrelli and Yann Bochsler, as well as the contributors to the special issue and the anonymous reviewers for their sharp and constructive comments. Moreover, Mahmoud al-Tamir, for his insightful comments to the content of this article.