Paper Walls: Administrative Burden and the Unequal Inclusion of Refugees

A growing body of literature has drawn attention to the ways in which administrative burdens – or the onerous tasks and costs encountered in interactions with government services – can compound immigrants’ exclusion from social rights or delay their access to rights (Heinrich, 2018; Schmidt et al., 2023). This paper draws on semi-structured interviews with 30 refugee welfare recipients in Berlin, Germany, who discuss the stresses and administrative challenges they encounter in the process of applying for and receiving social benefits. I contextualize interviewees’ experiences within the structural framework – including immigration and welfare policies and the varying institutional contexts of organizations serving refugees with different legal statuses – that shapes administrative burden, along with street-level encounters. Of the 30 interviewees, ten are Ukrainian, and all other interviewees are members of nationalities that are racialized in Germany. Unlike the other interviewees, Ukrainians were fast-tracked into the German welfare system due to several national and EU-wide immigration and welfare policy changes. Overall, the study demonstrates how refugees with a precarious legal status in Germany experience systematically greater administrative burdens, such as experiences of limbo and waiting, when accessing welfare state resources, contributing to a system of differential inclusion in social rights. The aforementioned policy changes for Ukrainian refugees have lightened these experiences of burdens in accessing welfare, creating a system of racialized burden, or additional burdens upon racial minorities that serve as inequality reproducing mechanisms (Ray et al., 2022). In order to demonstrate these findings, I present three example cases – one of an asylum seeker, one of a recognized refugee, and one of a Ukrainian protection recipient – along with supporting evidence from the other interviews. Finally, I demonstrate how refugees draw on various human, social, and cultural capital resources in order to cope with these burdens.