Bureaucracy as border: barriers to social rights in Spain

Abstract

Social rights are the result of struggles fought at the margins, involving practices of solidarity and care, and interpellations to the state and other actors in charge of the provision of such protections. The current fight for social rights in Spain takes place within a shrinking space for solidarity made of the introduction of neoliberal policies within public services, the implementation of a myriad of bureaucratic barriers to access to those provisions and toxic political discourses against migrants, ethnic minorities and those in solidarity with them. In this chapter, we will examine the shrinking spaces where struggles for social rights take place with regard to two main public provisions in Spain: healthcare and an economic benefit for low-income households. The obstacles that people encounter to access these services take forms that we have categorized into three types of intertwined processes: bureau-deterrence, bureau-exclusion and bureau-repression. They amount to an invisible withdrawal of welfare “from below”, which takes place in daily interactions in a complex institutional context where the criminalization of poverty is gaining pace.