Racism in and for the Welfare State

The text highlights that welfare racism is a structural phenomenon, resulting from: a colonial and racial root of the welfare state; the link between colonialism-racism-capitalism; the fact that racism is a constitutive factor of modern society; the intrinsic limits placed on the expansion of social rights by capitalism and social class structure; the embedding of social rights in national citizenship. This chapter underlines that welfare racism is also a structured phenomenon consisting of a set of policies, practices and discourses, and a structuring phenomenon producing inequalities, accompanying the processes of casualisation, inferiorisation and criminalisation of immigrants. Furthermore, it points out that, within the unstoppable rise of anti-immigrant racism of the last two decades, welfare racism gained new momentum. His “return” happened in parallel to the general harshening of the migration policies, to the war on migrants taking over much of the world, to the awakening in grand style of state racism; at the same time, his “return” occurred in a general context of attacks against labour and social rights, of revision and narrowing of social citizenship, of amputation, privatisation and individualisation of the welfare state. Finally, the chapter highlights that welfare racism is an instrument of exploitation, exclusion, social selection, and a means of dividing the working class. It introduces elements of differentiation and new stratifications into the working class in addition to the existing ones, which are linked to the segmentations present in the world market, to the differential exploitation of the labour force in the world labour market, to the global system of inequalities. It is a carrier in the process of reducing social rights to the detriment of the whole working class. For these reasons welfare racism concerns labour as a whole and all workers.