Understanding challenges and pitfalls in the service delivery to newly arrived immigrants

Sousa Martins da Costa Santos, Adriana [UCL] Vandermeerschen, Hanne Mescoli, Elsa

While Chapter 4 gives a clear view on how service delivery to newcomer beneficiaries at the Public Centres of Social Welfare is organised, it is important to reflect on some specific challenges and pitfalls of providing services to this specific population. In a first paragraph, a number of general challenges of service provision within the PCSWs are considered. The willingness and ability of street-level bureaucrats to act in a certain way towards newcomers is partly determined by the general context in which they operate, a context that is characterised by a high workload, time pressure, and institutional requirements and constraints. In the second and subsequent sections, we shift the focus to newcomers and the specific challenges in terms of welfare provision for this group. A first aspect that is discussed here is the difficulty of providing sufficient support at the social level (such as psychosocial support and guidance). A second challenge – which is intrinsically linked with the accessibility of the PCSW to newly arrived immigrants – lies in the understandability of the system and its procedures, and the resulting awareness of entitlement to rights and benefits. Indeed, knowledge is found to be essential for the take up of rights, and existing knowledge (and power) asymmetries in PCSW services between staff and beneficiaries seem accrued for newly arrived immigrants. Third, and related to the previous point, language problems are a major stumbling block in the communication, while communication is essential in the aid relationship. We therefore examine the strategies that are used by PCSWs’ staff members/social workers to circumvent these issues. In addition, we consider the impact of language problems (and the approach to them) on the accessibility and quality of services. It should be noted that most of these challenges – perhaps with the exception of language problems in some cases – also exist for other beneficiaries, or at least to some extent. However, dealing with newly arrived immigrants, these difficulties tend to be exacerbated for various reasons, which will be shown in this chapter.