Marginalising Policies on Asylum Seekers in Austria

Due to the flow of refugees from the war zone Syria, the discussion about how to deal with asylum seekers has also gained new weight in Austria and given broader space to right-wing extremist argumentations. As far as the integration of asylum seekers is concerned, the question of at what point asylum seekers are allowed to do which kind of work is central. While countries such as Germany since years have relied on taking profit of the labour force of asylum seekers to broaden the domestic labour supply, policy in Austria has taken a different approach.

Against this background, the paper analyses the development of labour and training opportunities for adult and youth asylum seekers in the three phases: (1) during the first coalition of the conservative ÖVP with the right-wing populist/extremist FPÖ (2000-2005), (2) during the coalition of the social democratic SPÖ and the conservative ÖVP (2005-2017), and (3) during the second conservative/right-wing populist/extremist coalition (2017-2019).

In particular, policies of the right-wing coalitionists such as work bans and cuts to social benefits, education and training opportunities seek to marginalize rather than integrate asylum-seekers through exclusionary discourses and measures as part of an “organized disintegration” (Vicki Täubig).

These measures of a welfare-chauvinist, authoritarian and populist social policy build – with reference to nativist and racist argumentations – an imaginary border within the population, which is supposed to serve the further underpinning of populist argumentations.