The Role of Welfare State Development in an Era of Global Migration

• In Event: New Approaches to Conceptualizing and Measuring the Welfare State

Abstract

States, even those in low-income countries, appear willing to invest precious resources in improving vital registration when illegibility undermines their ability to implement core projects. The literature has historically emphasized factors such as military conscription, taxation, and the internal control of populations as motivations for documenting and delimiting subjects and citizens within given political borders. More recently, especially with respect to the Global South, scholars have begun to analyze as stimulants to ID documentation the role of political processes like democratization (with its reliance on voter rolls) and welfare state development (with its dependence on the registration and enrollment of recipients). In countries characterized by the significant influx of irregular migrants, states that are expanding social safety nets are especially incentivized to delimit citizens from non-citizens. This paper aims to examine the interplay of new welfare provisioning in contexts of significant population influx on state efforts to improve vital registration across a range of countries in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa.

Author

• Wendy Hunter, University of Texas, Austin