Where Asylum and Austerity Meet: Deservingness and In/Exclusion in Rochdale

Abstract

The UK's asylum and social welfare systems have both been transformed by major organisational changes, funding cuts, and privatisations through a decade of austerity. With this, asylum-seeker accommodation and the impacts of welfare reform have become increasingly concentrated in already-impoverished, peripheral urban areas such as Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Despite these parallels, scholarship and commentary in the UK has tended to consider welfare and border regimes in relative isolation. Based on ethnographic work conducted in two charity drop-centres in the town, this article addresses this gap by exploring how the UK's converging politics and geographies of asylum and welfare governance shape everyday negotiations of deservingness and social in/exclusion.