Part 3 Summary of Findings, Conclusions and
3.2 The Ethics of Social Work with Cross-border Migrants and the Question of How to Promote Social Justice
3.2.1 The Ethical Framing of Social Work Practice in the Literature on Cross-border Migration
All the publications considered in Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 engage with the question of ethics in the field of cross-border migration. Explicitly or implicitly, all frame the core ethical challenges as arising from the dynamic interplay between three factors. These are the global processes that have created contemporary forms of cross-border migration; national contexts that place practitioners within institutionalised practices of exclusion and control; and the normative framework contained in the Global Definition of Social Work and the document, Ethics in Social Work, Statement of Principles, both of which orient social workers towards promoting ‘social cohesion … the empowerment and liberation of people ... social justice [and] human rights’ for all (IFSW/IASSW 2004, 2014). The reviewed literature highlights two tensions. Firstly, social workers in their great majority operated within, rather than across, the structures provided by territorial states. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt and Seyla Benhabib among others, Jönsson (2014) refers to the ethical predicament of the field as arising from ‘a historical dilemma and conflict between universal values on the one hand, and the interests of the nation state on the other’ (2014:i36). She contends that this dilemma has been exacerbated by processes of globalisation in that ‘migration and global social problems increasingly challenge the national basis of social work’ (2014:i37). Barberis and Boccagni (2014:i71) call this the ‘dilemma between ethical universalism and tacit nativism’, while Briskman, Zion and Loff (2012) refer to it as the tension between social work’s dual, professional and institutional, mandate. Social work, as a profession, aspires to be guided by the needs of service users, responding to them equally and irrespective of citizenship or residence status. Yet this universal orientation tends to clash with the organisational arrangements that structure social workers’ day-to-day practices. As employing agencies, states bind social workers to government rules, and as providers of the legal, policy and funding frameworks for NGOs' activities, states regulate the operational space of social
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workers outside of government employment. In this way, the profession becomes aligned with state power, with practitioners promoting rather than challenging, government interests and sovereign claims. This has been shown above to include social workers’ frequent participation in the exclusion of cross-border migrants, irrespective of the actual needs of the excluded.
Secondly, the overarching processes referred to by the term neoliberalism (see Chapter 2) and the micro-practices to which they have given rise (as per Sections 3.1.1 and 3.1.2 above) have been summarised by Barberis and Boccagni (2014) as the ‘societal de-legitimisation’ of social work’s caring responsibilities by presenting service users as ‘undeserving’ (2014:i71; cf.
Humphries 2004; Sales and Hek 2004; Cemlyn 2008) and by criminalising solidarity (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i84; cf. Jönsson 2014). On the one hand, Hugman (2010a) proposes with Nussbaum (2000) that the notions of human rights, needs, and social justice cannot usefully be decoupled. While conceptually distinct, they ‘exert a moral claim that they should be developed’ (Hugman 2010a:133), and this provides the social work profession with a universally relevant purpose (see Section 3.2.2 below). On the other hand, the reviewed literature found that austerity measures in welfare translated into limited funding and increased use of competitive, project-based financing of services, while exerting pressures on bidding organisations to represent their work ‘in technical terms’ (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i76). Against a background of nationalist-exclusionary discourses that rendered cross- border migrants ‘excessive and illegitimate users of welfare’, pressures then mounted on service providers to be selective in terms of which category of service users and which needs were foregrounded, and which kinds of claims were to remain unheeded (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i79). A common outcome of this was a rationing of services based on the
‘profiling of … clients [in] more rigid and less personalised ways’ (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i81; cf. Sales and Hek 2004; Cemlyn 2008). Consequently, needs were ‘increasingly and even legally decoupled from social rights’ (Barberis and Coccagni 2014:i84; cf. Hayes and Humphries 2004; Briskman, Zion and Loff 2012). In other words, the ideas of human rights, needs and social justice were severed in practice, even though an ethically well-grounded social work profession might require them to be seen in conjunction.
The preceding sections illustrate a range of consequences that these dynamics exert on the lives and practices of social workers in the field. Several studies came across practitioners who
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had internalised, embraced and defended discourses that legitimised exclusionary practices, and who therefore seemed comfortable enough in their professional roles (Sales and Hek 2004; Zorn 2007; Cemlyn 2008; Jönsson 2014; Mostowska 2014). Conversely, some authors quoted participants who expressed sensitivity towards their service users’ difficult life circumstances and awareness of burdened service provider/service user relationships, who articulated experiences of affective dissonance, and who spoke about their own strained mental health (Sales and Hek 2004; Guhan and Libling-Kalifani 2011; Al-Makhamreh, Spaneas and Neocleus 2012; Robinson 2013, 2014). Such practitioners were often presented as being conscious of the universalism-versus-nativism dilemma (Barberis and Boccagni’s 2014), though less was said about their awareness and understanding of processes which worked to delegitimise their care for service users. Finally, a number of authors evidenced acts of solidarity and resistance. Yet by and large, these interventions appeared to be fragmented (Cemlyn 2008; cf. Briskman, Zion and Loff 2012), informal and spontaneous and had occasionally been driven ‘underground’ – as in Jönsson’s (2014) undocumented practices and Mostowska’s (2014) subversive strategies. And while such examples point to conceivable openings for resolving the identified dilemmas, they also appeared as ‘maverick’ and potentially short-lived exceptions to the rule (Williams and Graham 2014:13) rather than amounting to serious alternatives to the dominant practices.
Seeking to explain these responses, several authors apply a typology of social work practice in the field of cross-border migration which also contains a moral appraisal of their research participants’ attitudes and actions. Hayes and Humphries (2004) and Jönsson (2014) are particularly explicit in their moral condemnation of those social workers whose practices were deemed to mirror exclusionary discourses, policies and laws. Hayes and Humphries (2004) contend that the official role of social work with cross-border migrants in Great Britain is to be ‘part of the infrastructure of enforcement’ of exclusionary rules and regulations (Hayes 2004:26), and that employing agencies have ‘been transformed into technological machines’
(Humphries 2004:33) that serve to facilitate this role. Humphries (2004:33-35) continues to assert that,
It is not surprising then that the behaviour of social workers … appears to have little concern for the ethical questions raised by their being drawn into policing immigration status, or the morality of their complicity in leaving asylum seekers without money or accommodation, or the politics, the quasi-market mentality ... The job is seen as a technical and mechanistic routine … Most social workers, although aware of the depth of poverty and human suffering
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and of the limitations of their role to change this, have been content to continue with individualistic models of practice and ignore any attempt to change social structures.
Ten years on in the Swedish context, Jönsson (2014) comes to similar conclusions, complaining that, ‘established technocratic and authoritative methods of social work practice today limit social workers’ possibilities to initiate creative practices and develop new methods for working with new and globalised social problems’ (Jönsson 2014:i45). In her view, social workers are able to conform to exclusionary discourses, policies, and laws simply by ‘following established practices where global social problems are portrayed as individual problems, often based on individual choices’ (Jönsson 2014:i46), and by avoiding critically-reflexive engagement with their own social positioning in relation to these problems. Thus ‘distancing themselves from the complexities and problems’ in the lives of their service users,
They show no interest in discussions concerning global power relations and privileges as possible reasons behind increasing immigration. They have uncritically embraced the neoliberal adjustment, mainly referring to national laws and rules where undocumented immigrants as non-citizens are ‘naturally’ excluded … Some legitimise their passivity [by saying that] … they have no legal obligation. Many social workers … keep their mouths shut about injustices which they do not have to deal with … They can help, but they do not (Jönsson 2014:i46-i47).
Jönsson (2014) argues that there is a mutually reinforcing relationship between these observations and her sense that such social workers also lack general knowledge about global and structural processes and display little to no awareness of social work’s global ethical commitments (IFSW/IASSW 2004).
A second type of response is characterised not as lacking in reflexivity in the sense that many social workers did express an awareness of the moral dilemmas intrinsic to the work in the field and engaged in such actions as might remedy these dilemmas. Still, their responses are considered to be uncritical and apolitical in that they did not seem to be grounded in a structural analysis of cross-border migration as a historical, socio-economic and political problem. Thus, several authors found that practitioners engaged in practices which Mostowska (2014:i26) labels as acts of exceptional humanism. Based on a notion of ‘common humanity’, they opted at times to overlook the differences between cross-border migrants and local service users, displayed kindness and care, and subverted or ignored those rules that they considered inhumane. Mostowska (2014:i26) is concerned, however, that these attitudes and actions were ‘also an indication of helplessness; only short-term solutions
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[seemed] possible in the context of the overall regulations’. Briskman, Zion and Loff (2012:43) offer a strongly normative assessment of such responses, calling them, with reference to Bill Jordan (1990), ‘isolated acts of banditry’. They contend that ‘in this way … professionals embraced … a morality based upon empathy,’ and that ‘caring and relationships were preferred to confronting questions of justice and rights’ (Briskman, Zion and Loff 2012:48).
Citing Saul Alinsky (Kenny 1999), they distinguish ‘between those who are prepared to fight for the rights of the ‘under-dog’ and those who are … not’, arguing that ‘without active opposition, we perpetuate existing unequal social and political relations’. Their arguments mirror those of Hayes and Humphries (2004) who reduce the ethical question to a simple binary:
Essentially, social work now has a choice: We can campaign, defend and battle for service users who have immigration problems or we can simply be part of the … immigration infrastructure. (Hayes 2004:26).
In Humphries’ (2004:39) view, this opposition means that there is really only one moral choice:
The profession has a choice to make a new moral effort, to find its anger about the plight of the poor [and] to engage its knowledge about the sources of inequality with a new sense of imperative and urgency’.
After all, Zorn (2007) says with reference to the definition of social work (IFSW/IASSW 2002, 2014) and its statement of ethical principles (IFSW/IASSW 2004):
Social work is a profession that challenges inequality and structural oppression, whether perpetrated individually or socially through institutional structures and cultural norms … This is precisely the goal of social work practice: to empower people whose rights are violated or jeopardised and to be engaged in a mutual struggle for social justice … To rethink social justice, equality and solidarity in the local and global context, it is crucial to be explicit about our values and interests, thereby considering all the contradictions imposed on us(Zorn 2007:136-141).
In these arguments, ‘social work’, or ‘the profession’, comes to personify of all those practitioners who see themselves as working to advance the normative aspirations of the global definition of social work and its statement of ethical principles. This contains the notion that in so far as practitioners fall short of abiding by these norms, they also fall short of being
‘true’ social workers. To this end, several authors considered in this chapter propose a third type of response: interventions considered to be the ‘most moral’ in relation to cross-border migrants are political in that they arise from critical structural analysis and are likely to lead
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to social workers joining progressive civil society alliances, organising and participating in social action, and engaging in critical, radical, structural, or anti-oppressive forms of social work (Hayes and Humphries 2004; Zorn 2007; Cemlyn 2008; Briskman, Zion and Loff 2012;
Jönsson 2014). Implicit in this moral assessment is the idea that to ignore, undermine or break the law forms part of this third, ‘most moral’ type of response only to the extent that it is rooted in a critical structural analysis and understood to be one component of a broader orientation towards social justice, and one among a range of interventions aimed to counter social injustice, oppression and exclusion in the lives of individuals and families.
Yet it has been noted that many of those social workers who did not wish to collude with exclusionary discourses, policies and laws also felt powerless, vulnerable and found their radius for action constrained, and that those practices of resistance recorded in the literature, seemed somewhat fragmented, informal, spontaneous and potentially short-lived. What kind of provisions might encourage and enable social workers to engage in the kinds of inclusionary, anti-oppressive and socially just practices proposed by, among others, Hayes and Humphries (2004), Zorn (2007), Cemlyn (2008), Briskman, Zion and Loff (2012) and Jönsson (2014)? Either explicitly or implicitly, all these authors take recourse to the global definition of social work and the profession’s statement of ethical principles.
Thus, Barberis and Boccagni’s (2014:i77) unease about the fact that these ethical guidelines are ‘quite general’ is worth noting. While this is intentional as the global statement of ethical principles aims ‘to encourage social workers across the world to reflect on the challenges and dilemmas that face them and make ethically informed decisions about how to act in each particular case’ (IFSW/IASSW 2004), Barberis and Boccagni (2014:i77) are concerned that considerable levels of ethical awareness, critical reflexivity and skills are required as a prerequisite for social workers to be able to translate these guidelines into actual practices.
Yet they feel, social work intervention in the field of cross-border migration is ‘typically naïve’
and ‘experience-based’. The authors contend therefore that as practitioners use their
‘discretionary power’ and rely on ‘communities of practice’ to find ways of including
‘innovation and social justice into the professional mandate’, their ‘good-willing unawareness’ may increase their risk of experiencing ‘burnout … at a personal level’ and produce ‘distorted effects … at a systemic level’, (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i77-i78). In respect of the latter concern, they write:
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An oppositional culture that perceives normative production on immigration as discriminatory and thus ‘breakable’ … grounds a mistrust in norms that sometimes are not used even when favourable for clients ... This radical … discretion questions social justice, since it is grounded on an implicit and unpredictable selectivity, providing unequal responses to similar need profiles … This can boost exclusion in ways difficult to perceive and oppose, since they are typically based on informal and fragmented practices’ (Barberis and Boccagni 2014:i78).
In other words, a critical political outlook and structural analysis might be an important but possibly insufficient resource with which to achieve inclusionary, anti-oppressive and socially just outcomes. Also required is a systematic engagement of social workers with themselves, their own social positioning, needs, desires, value base and practices, and an alertness to the always possible yet unintended outcomes of their interventions.
In short, the reviewed literature is quite successful in delineating some of the origins, nature and dynamics of the ethical challenges encountered by practitioners working with cross- border migrants, and the ways in which social work practice falls short of meeting the profession’s aspirations of countering social injustice and promoting social justice. Yet the way in which practitioners might be enabled to do these aspirations greater justice is less clear. In the cited texts, the global definition of social work and the profession’s statement of ethical principles have been shown to provide important reference points for academic writers wishing to evaluate the ethics of social work practice in the field of cross-border migration. Yet concerns have emerged regarding the extent to which these documents are successful in actually supporting ethical practice. It is important to explore these tensions before drawing this chapter to a conclusion.