‘Managing’ Welfare in Cross-Border Migration: The Case of Nepal

As migrant workers cross borders, their entitlement to social protection and their ability to mitigate risks pertaining to mobility and employment abroad comes into question. This paper brings together recent scholarly work on the question of social protection of migrant workers and examines how migrant sending states either facilitate or deny access to welfare under the façade of ‘management’. Developing our existing knowledge of TSP (transnational social protection), we argue that the question of social protection needs to be understood in the backdrop of the regime of migration governance of which it is a part of. The post-cold war, neoliberal regime of ‘migration management’ mobilizes non-state actors to produce and sustain ‘desirable’ forms of mobility. In this context, this paper makes the conceptual contribution of ‘welfare management’ as a neoliberal strategy of dealing with the question of social protection and welfare of transnationally mobile workforce. Informed by ethnographically informed qualitative research conducted in Kathmandu, Nepal, I show how under the current regime of migration governance, the traditional state-citizen relationship undergoes reconfiguration. From putting the onus of social protection on the migrants through selective information dissemination, to using the logic of reciprocity and deservingness to provide welfare to specific migrants, the Nepalese state uses a number of strategies to manage welfare instead of granting it unconditionally. This case study, therefore, contributes to our understanding of how migrant welfare services and provisions act as tools of migration control and how 'management' of welfare does not eliminate social inequality but merely redistributes it.