| dc.description.abstract | Contributing to scarce literature on migrants’ justice and deservingness perceptions, this study explores how status holders receiving social assistance and people and organisations working with them experience and perceive justice and deservingness in the current Dutch social assistance system. Taking a qualitative, bottom-up approach, data is collected from 12 in-depth interviews. The findings show status holders justify their self-deservingness based on their specific needs as refugees and their contributions to society (reciprocity). Their experiences illustrate the recognition-redistribution dilemma: while calling for a recognition of and differential treatment based on their vulnerable position, they also consider the Dutch social assistance system just, because the same rules apply to everyone equally. When evaluating others’ deservingness, control and attitude are important: status holders regard sick people with no control over their needs most deserving and recipients with bad attitudes towards reciprocation least deserving. They mention advantages of fulfilling mandatory counter achievements (e.g. volunteer work, language courses, labour market preparation trainings), which they consider just contributions to society in exchange for receiving benefits. However, municipalities’ activation is considered too ‘pushy’, not sufficiently taking into account individual and personal situations, experiences, skills, and desires. Additionally, decentralization of responsibilities to municipalities is argued to cause unjust inequalities, i.e. differential treatment based on geographical location, particularly affecting status holders, who are assigned to social housing in a certain municipality and experience limited mobility. The findings implicate that to achieve justice, policy should focus on equal capabilities instead of resources, taking status holders’ background into account. | |
