Welfare Service Professionals, Migrants, and the Question of Trust. A Danish Case

Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze migrants’ interpretations of their encounters with welfare service professionals in Denmark, focusing on client trust and exploring its diversity across professions. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants. Migrants as newcomers to the welfare state constitute an interesting case that might allow specific insights into how and in what ways trust and distrust emerge. Aspects such as procedural justice, professional morality, and personal feelings have emerged from the explorative analysis as important trust-generating features of encounters. Trust in the welfare state appears to be useful for “overriding” negative experiences with individual professionals and in other cases of distrust, and migration specific exit practices have been observed. Finally, some migrants do indeed seem to apply experiences of trust with welfare service professionals to the Danish state or even society, and thus the professionals involved can be called hidden “integrative” resources.