Invisible Hands or the neoliberal logic governing the social

Debora Avila Cantos and Marta Malo de Molina [draft translation by Rodrigo Nunes, Francesco Salvini, Manuela Zechner]

Thursday, 7 July 2011 - 5PM-7PM Working paper for "Governance and migration in the crisis: a militant research on social services in Madrid" in Postcolonial Capitalism Seminar Series Centre for Ethics and Politics, School of Business and Management - Francis Bancroft Building, Room 4.04/08 Queen Mary, University of London

1. Just in case they close In January 2009, the recently opened Escuela de Profesionales de Inmigracion y Cooperacion of Comunidad de Madrid organized a cycle of seminars about Immigration, integration in times of crisis. The Counsellor of Immigration and Cooperation, Javier Fernandez Lasquetty, intervened to publicly present the Madrid model for immigrant integration, resulting from the evaluation of the 2nd Plan of Integration 2006-2008. The principles of this plan represented the key words for the development of the 3rd plan for 2009-2012.
Concluding this balance, I want to tell you that from my point of view, there are much more positive than negative elements. Madrileos share their work, life, and friendships with new neighbours born outside Spain. And this is something to be proud of for Madrid. I am conscious that many things are left to be done. And that an extraordinary work has been done by thousands of people in Madrid, in supporting groups, NGOs, foundations, associations and immigrants association for welcoming people and integrate immigrants. And finally we have to be conscious that the immense majority of immigrants affirm to feel integrated.

Just one year before the Madrids Ayuntamiento presented a written evaluation for the 1st Plan Madrid of Social and Intercultural Co-living (2004-2007). And in this case the evaluation of results was even more affirmative than the one of the Council of Immigration. 1

As in the case of great Cathedrals, the effort to build the Plan for building the present and future Madrid has been immense. But, unlike great Cathedrals, those who have been involved in Plan Madrid came to see their oeuvre completed, the results of it and they can affirm today without any doubt that Plan Madrid allows an harmonic convivencia [living together]. [175]. In general we can say that our dispositives have been very well accepted by their beneficiaries, and that have permitted a great leap in the work done till now in Convivencia Intercultural [22]. We are witnessing to an extensive consolidation, that guarantees what we achieved, and aim to reach the most of the population, including new immigrants that still are coming in our city [177].

However, the satisfaction of these evaluations - presenting their own work as successfully facing a difficult challenge is in contrast with the concrete ways of acting both on the local level of Ayuntamiento and regional one, Comunidad de Madrid from the end of 2007 till the beginning of 2009, when the Plan Madrid of Ayuntamiento, and the Plan Integracion of the CAM ended. In these two years, the most of the resources and dispositives proposed in the Plans have been closed, reduced, or in the best of cases restructured in terms of managing companies. The Centers of Social Support to Immigrants, (CASI), have been the most important effort of the CAM. Initially proposed as complementary services for the basic social services, 14 centres have been opened during two years. Today however, only two of them are still working. The same happened for many of the dispositives proposed in the Plan Madrid del Ayuntamiento: the Esculela de Mediadores Sociales Interculturales, the Escuela de Convivnencia, the Programa for temporary shelter and support for Sub-Saharan people or the Grupo de Asistencia Juridica contra el Racismo y la Xenofobia are just some examples of which dispositives have been closed down. Beyond these, the closures affected also services that have been working for many more years like the Servicio de Mediacion Social Intercultural (SEMSI) that was working in 21 districts of the city since 1997. Almost 30 mediators have been fired in February 2009 and the space had been finally closed. Other dispositives have avoided to be closed, but not heavy cuts to their functions and budgets, as shown by the case of the Observatorio de la Migraciones y de la Convivencia Intercultural del Ayutamiento de Madrid (in which the budgets for research and participation have been reduced practically to zero, when the qualitative research and the social intervention have been cut) or the Servicio de Traduccion e Interpretacion, that cannot offer anymore any personal support and has been reduced to a mere call-centre. The excellence of some services, mentioned in the evaluation documents, has not been enough to avoid, if not the closure, the management shift in these dispositives. Many social enterprises have been obliged to renounce to the work they have realized in the last years and leave the management of the resources they were in charge of to other entities, that are starting from the beginning the same path their predecessor had already walked.

The starting up of a dispositive for support implies a significant investment of money and resources for providing the facilities with the needed equipment, infrastructures, personal training, advertisement etc. For the same reason, once the dispositive is working, it is necessary a certain amount of time to get to a relative balance among demand of users and supply of services and, until the definition of benchmarks and trust-links that allow the implementation of a dispositive in the social context in which it pretends to intervene. The most of the dispositives in the Plan Madrid and in the Plan de Integracion are very recent. This is why closing them (or reducing their budget, or even changing the enterprise that manages them) after few months or one year implies the infra-use (misuse) of the investments that have been done. But the closure implies much more than just this. For its workers (the great majority of which are female workers), after months or years of deep professional and personal involvement in a project, the closure shows how all the efforts spent can become all of a sudden completely useless. The rage, anxiety, anguish and frustration generated by this process go hand in hand with uncertainty: on the one hand, the uncertainty on the destiny for those who use the facility people with whom the workers have built link, to which they feel attached by a sentiment of responsibility, and that they are forced to abandon overnight; on the other hand the labour uncertainty of oneself when the facilities were closed, workers did not have any information about whether if they were going to be relocated or if their contract were considered as concluded. Since the closures were prolonged in time, some workers had to experience several of them, with all the attached implications.
[I lived] two different closures, and the third for an inch a CASI (in Puente de Vallecas): I arrived there and it was closed at the end of the month, in 2005. Then I worked in the department for humanitarian support in the Red Cross, and it lasted 15 days all of a sudden the Ayuntamiento called: we are closing the tap now. It was 2006. And then in 2007 in the Grupo 5 [a program for temporary shelter and support for people with sub-Saharan background]. One closure per year! And it is something very destabilizing on the emotional level, because ones life depends on contracts and on labour continuity and also because you realize that you leave a lot of cases unsolved In the second closure, some sub-Saharan recognized me because we met in the first programme and they are not aware of the political dynamics. They told me (in a recriminatory tone) You were in the Red Cross when they closed it! You are right, I was fired as well, I was left in the street as well. They identify you with the closure, and with the Ayuntamiento, and this is something that outrages me. [] How much we cried there is something nobody knows. [Interviews with social workers, may 2008].

Possibly this dimension of instability of labour is what blocks most of the workers attempts to give a collective answer to face the closures. When there is the risk of loosing the job, instead of betting for a collective organization, the most typical response is to activate a competence among the workers (to see who could get to be relocated) and submissive attitudes in their relationship with the enterprise in charge 3

of management (because of the fear that any protest would affect the relocation).
In the middle of the turmoil for the closure, everything was a chaos. There were not hits, but there were many sparks [May 2008]

The users on their side are very affected by every closure, cuts or changes in the management of a dispositive:
Another very sad thing is how they came to get the files: with a courier services. Not even somebody from the Ayuntamiento [] The lawyer, in this moment of tension and anxiety, wrote a document to record the number we had handed out [] since they could get lost, we did not have any idea where they were going, and this is confidential information. The lack of ethic of all that, and of professionalism and you cannot do anything [Social worker, May 2008] I feel, as I said before, very sad I thought I would go back there, now that I got my second child to have the same consultant on what I have to do and now I dont know what to do, where to go [A user of the CASI Majadahonda, May 2008]

Depending on the facilities, these situations could come to be dramatic. During the management change in the Programme of temporary shelter of the sub-Saharan community (that was temporary closed), the information provided to the users living in the houses was so little that, when they were moved by bus to a provisional hotel, the situation came to moments of panic since some of the people was convinced they were going to be deported. Furthermore, the tensions and anguishes of both groups grow due to the way in which the decision of closing are normally communicated: generally rumours come first. Workers, trapped in the anxiety, have no official news until the last moment, and sometimes they are asked not to tell the users about the forthcoming closure of the services.
Since October/November 2007 rumours about the end of subventions for this service have been circulating and nobody wanted to confirm it to us at anytime from the Ayuntamiento the rumours said that, even if the (annual) contract had not been signed, it was a matter of days. [] they muddled us till December, and in January all the issue became much more serious [] many colleagues were retired [] all of a sudden, in the middle of the month without any previous news they did not even get paid, although they were working on some cases []. Some people told me after February, once they told us there was neither contract nor anything else, that the Ayuntamiento was saying the service would keep going [workers in the Plan Madrid, April 2008]

At the same time in which cuts and closures were going on in several dispositives, new resources were appearing on the scene. While the CASI were closing, CAM opened Centros de Participacion e Integracion de Immingrantes (CEPI), services in which a basic social support is substituted by cultural initiatives, that permitted the division of different centres by nationalities. The end of the long ending trajectory of the SEMSI matched up with the decision of the Ayutamiento to invest on dynamization; the contracts of Neighbours Dynamizators have been renewed for further four years and their presence have been reinforced and a new role have been introduced, the one of the Public Space Dynamizator. Looking at this scenario and contrasting the triumphal evaluations of Plan Madrid or Plan de Integracion with the closures, cuts and shifts in management, witnessing the rapid series of opening, closure and new opening, and the wasting of resources and the problems it caused, the question of what is the plan behind all this is inevitable. What do the Autonomic and Local government have in their minds when they plan and realize these kind of policies? Is it just the capricious assemblage of random decisions or is there any logic behind? Possibly the first answer is that all this is the consequence of the cuts in budgets. And surely this is partly true. In September 2008, the first public presentation of the draft for the Plan de Integracion 2009-2011 of the CAM, Pablo Gomez Tavira, Director for Immigration of the Consejeria de Immigracion y Cooperacion of the CAM, mentioned the challenge involved in maintaining the same services for an harmonious convivencia in Madrid, like they have done in the last years, in the middle of the economic crisis, when cuts of budgets will be introduced forcing the optimization of those resources that will remain available. And indeed the new Plan de Integracion of the CAM presented in April 2009 suffered a heavy cut back in the budget. Even if, as we will highlight later, the cuts had been planned before the irruption of the economic crisis, it is true that the new context implied a shift in priorities: public resources bounded to social support or improving the convivencia, had to be shifted to skills training and job orienteering.
This Tuesday the Ministero del Trabajo e Inmigracion released that Spain had lost during the last year more than one hundred thousand members of Social Security. Although it is true that in the CAM the situation is less dramatic if compared to the national average, there are no doubts about the fact that the crisis is affecting us too. This is the reason why our main task since a few months and from now on will be focused on orienteering and training people for jobs. [Javier Fernandez Lasquetty, Consueller of Inmigracion y Cooperacion of CAM in the seminars on Immigration and integration in times of crisis December 2008]

Nevertheless, the cuts in budgets are not the only reason that explains the changes in the design of public policies for migration in Madrid since this would not explain the opening of new services that accompanied the closure. A second take for understanding the way of acting of the Autonomic and Local governments will focus on the political interests as a key factor for our analysis:

behind every closure, behind every shift in management and finally behind the opening of new services, there is the attempt of supporting kindred NGOs, more related to the political principles of the governing forces for guaranteeing that the development of concrete services and policies would follow the line defined from the top. In this sense the shift in the governments and in the relations of power inside the parties themselves would explain the extreme volatility of these policies.
I have to feed this NGO, and this is all today here, tomorrow there this is a political game, a game of power that is about bending yourself over for the Public Adminsitration [Social workers, May 2008]

There is no doubt that this would explain why in the Universidad Francisco de Vitoria, managed by Legionarios de Cristo (a kindred group close to many figures of the CAM Government) has been the most important beneficiary of resources aimed to no-profit institutions for the development of programs and projects to support migrant population in the Comunidad de Madrid in 2008. However, it is less clear why the Comision Espaola de Ayuda al Refugiado (much more closer to the political opposition in the CAM) has been the second beneficiary in the same tender and the forth in the Public tender for Resources in Projects for Social Initiatives supporting the social and intercultural convivencia in 2008 in the Local Government of Madrid. So many changes, oscillations, and contradictions makes it tempting to agree with a social worker and believe that the series of slights involved in the permanent opening and closing of social services is the effect of a general foolishness of those who are governing:
I think that it is not so much a matter of budgets, but the lack of a political will, behind which we can recognize either a negative intentionality, or a complete ignorance [Social worker, May 2008].

Nonetheless, our thesis points in a different direction. We believe that the budget cuts, the attempt of supporting NGOs loyal to the current governors, or the foolishness and ignorance of our governors are just one part of the explanation. There is something else. Our thesis affirms that the process of closing and opening implemented in the recent years by public policies of Local and Autonomic Governments are a privileged object of analysis to detect a general tendency of social policies that escapes, or better said, exceed any political colour. We can witness similar processes if we look at other Local and Autonomic Government managed by different parties. We refer here to the tendency of introducing a neoliberal bias in the social intervention in particular and in the social services in general. 2. The Neoliberal Social [or The social according to neoliberalism] There is a common feature shared by both defenders and detractors, which says that neoliberalism presupposes the reduction of state intervention to a minimum that,

according to its key principle, it's enough to let the 'invisible hand' on the market do in order for everything to work well. According to this same shared understanding, neoliberalism is the opposite of social policy: its highest priority in this case would be to press for the elimination of the latter. Our thesis, on the contrary, is that there is such a thing as a social policy proper to neoliberalism, specifically for the government of populations, which implicates state institutions however much it exceeds them. It's sure that neoliberalism reduces the interventions of public powers in the market to a minimum. But that does not mean that public powers don't intervene: indeed they do they intervene in the social, with an ensemble of precise operations, in order to organise it for the market, so that the social be productive and functional in terms of economic productivity, encouraging competition. This brings with it the introduction of the neoliberal logic in different fields: social interventions concerning migrants isn't an exception here. Behind the process of closures of dispositives of integration and conviviality of the C.A.M and the city council/ayuntamiento we can in fact see this logic at work. Here we want to slightly schematically give some detail of its traits, the effects of which largely exceed the closures and openings of dispositives of autonomous-regional and municipal immigration policy. Naturalizing social processes Neoliberalism considers a population as an ensemble of processes that need to be managed in and through that which is 'natural' to these processes. That's to say that the governmental techniques of neoliberal social policy situate themselves inside of their own reality, taking on all their complexity and 'letting things happen' as if they were talking about natural phenomena rather than setting themselves the objective of transforming reality in order to adequate it with a social model or norm. Seen from this perspective, a population is no longer an ensemble of subjects but a technopolitical governmental object that tends to auto-regulate itself. The translation of this vision towards local-level immigration policy appears as very clearly reflected in the discourse of Fernandez-Lasquetty, when he characterizes the 'Madrid model of integration of immigrants' as:
'A model that has had as its objective the favouring of a natural way of relations between persons. [] We let integration evolve with a degree of liberty [].' (Intervention of Javier Fernandez-Lasquetty during the working sessions [jornadas] on 'Immigration and integration in times of crisis', EPIC, january 2009)

In this optic, public policy should not 'distort' the 'natural' processes of self-regulation of the social:
'Some european experiments of the past have sought to artificially transfer social rights to immigrants, without understanding that the majority of them acquired them in the course of time, in a normal way... []. These artificial means carry an enormous risk, despite their good intentions: they put the spirit of improvement to sleep, limit the capacity of initiative and make people dependent on the welfare state. (Idem.).'

On top of that, they need to limit themselves to promoting (and adapting people to) the mechanisms of the market, understanding the latter as the most natural of processes:
A second characteristic of the Model of Integration Madrid is the consideration of employment/work primary factor of integration and, what's more, transmitting vehicle of the values of liberty, effort personal development. (Idem.). here in as the as the and of

All in all, this full trust in the social's capacity of 'natural' self-regulation does not exclude the deployment of mechanisms of intervention - in case the 'natural course' of events gives way to situations of 'risk' - for the 'good functioning' of the ensemble of the social. We'll come back to this later. What's sure in any case is that this naturalizing perspective contains social inequalities and discriminations (results of historical processes such as colonialism, but also of current systems exploitation at work and of enforced legislation citizenship law -) that remain naturalized: that is to say, understood as inevitable phenomena of reality. To correct there dynamics lies outside the field of competencies of this public policy. Broadly, their action is limited to setting up social dispositives that allow those with the 'will to succeed' to enjoy a certain upward social mobility within the rules of competition of the market. This choice covers up the logic within which it doesn't matter that as a group, immigrants have less recognized rights, receive worse salaries, work longer hours and live on less square metres and in neighbourhoods with less public services. What's important is not the collective, but persons:
A model that sees a different person in every immigrant: everyones with their own dream and their own necessities, capable of taking their own decisions and responsibility for their own actions. In our model, differentiations of politics don't fit with belief or cultural referents, just as collective ones don't. We only see persons, nothing less than persons. (Idem)

What's important is thus that immigrants with entrepreneurial spirit can enjoy 'equal opportunities' which will open the doors to success to them:
The big banner on Plaza Colon [] shows us another example of integration and of the success of migrants. Jos Luis Sosa is a person born in Uruguay, who came to Spain thirty years ago. He worked as a salesman in various companies and in an ice cream shop. One day he decided to start producing small flags in his own house. Thanks to years of hard work he made his business grow until he had a hall of 7.400 square metres in which 90 people of different nationalities work, and where they make all sorts of linen banners, including the one that crowns the plaza de Colon.

(Idem.)

This upward mobility of punctual migrants functions as an icon of integration and sends a clear accusatory message to those that don't achieve it: if some could triumph under the same conditions, there's nothing that stops the others from succeeding if they try hard enough. Thus the worse socioeconomic position which in fact the majority of migrants occupy in the society that receives them is attributed to the incapacity of certain subjects and/or 'cultures' as opposed to structural condition intrinsic to the event of migration. Trial and error From this 'naturalist' perspective, we can see that administration must be as flexible as possible in their interventions. This is how Tomas Vera, the previous General Director of Immigration and Cooperation of the Madrid City Council and supporter of Plan Madrid, underlined that from migration policy towards the local level, there is the necessity of encouraging:
Those mechanisms that allow administrations to remain flexible in the face of social changes, above all, and also in the face of the mechanisms of participation that allow us to advance towards addressing necessities, because in the end the citizen in the street perceives a change some 15 years before the administration realizes and adapts budgets, and only some 25 years later are we beginning to minimally act on this situation. (Interview with Tomas Vera, July 2008).

His homologue of the C.A.M speaks in the same sense:

We didn't let ourselves be tied by any academic or theoretical template in our ways of steering and managing integration/ On the contrary, we let integration evolve within an order of liberty, learning from our mistakes and good judgements in the process. (Intervention of Javier Fernandez-Lasquetty during the working sessions [jornadas] on 'Immigration and integration in times of crisis', EPIC, january 2009)

That is to say, against previous medium- or long-term planning, a procedure of 'trial and error' across the field is defended, open to provisional changes. Analyzing the openings and closures of dispositives from this point of view, they don't seem that illogical: we try and if it doesn't work or the necessities of the moment change or the playing field is displaced, we'll close and open something else. Since the social isn't a subject but rather an object of government, it matters very little that in the process we obliterate the dreams, efforts, expectations and trust networks of a handful or workers 9

and other immigrants: collateral damages of flexible management. This way it's possible to analyse the cuts and changes to the governing body of the Programme for temporary reception and service to people of subsaharan origin. In autumn of 2005, hundreds of africans jump the fences of Ceuta and Melilla: some get shot, others are brought to the desert or deported to their countries. There are also those that manage to stay and be moved to the peninsula. Their success produces news, indignation, international meetings and emergency agreements. At the same time as the 'Plan Africa' is being written, the fences of spanish cities and the surveillance of the Estrecho region are being reinforced. Migratory routes are forced to re-draw themselves and the arrival of small fishing boats in the Canary Islands begins. More news, stupefication, cold shivers. Those who die in the sea before reaching firm ground are plenty, others are deported upon their arrival, but again there are those who are transferred to the peninsula. Madrid is in full urbanist expansion and public works at this moment: the construction of the M-30 (a highway) amongst other things. In this complex context, in the framework of the Plan Madrid and under the management of 'Grupo 5', a programme of Reception and Services for subsaharian populations is launched. Nevertheless the climate of scandal and the need for construction workers at big public sites has receded two years after. Subsaharan people keep coming to the canary islands and some of them are still sent to Madrid, but by now they're neither novelty nor reason for alarm anymore. The 'emergency' appears under control. The rest we've already told: on the 28 th of december 2008, the programme closes temporarily. Two months later it is to be taken up again under the management of another body, but with a much reduced budget and with the handicap of having to go back to starting from zero. 3. Outsourcing and clientelism It is certain that, within this neoliberal logic, public administration becomes lighter: it must be capable of adapting to conjunctural situations and necessities whose primary characteristic is the natural flow of social processes. Like enterprises, it outsources part of its functions to a wide range of entities (NGOs, foundations, businesses, associations) so as to become more flexible. It is worth stressing that social services in general and social intervention in particular were among the first areas to be subjected to this kind of outsourcing, so-called specific services in particular (for the elderly, disabled, women, migrants, young people etc.) in the early 1980s, with the participation of the non-profit sector, and from the late 1980s and early 1990s, with the growing introduction of for-profit enterprises. In this sense, they should be regarded as a veritable testing ground for subsequent outsourcing (cleaning services, for instance). Against what a facile critique would presuppose, outsourcing is not a privatisation tout court, but a form of public-private mixed management where public administrations retain two fundamental functions: that of regulating agents, who establish priorities and establish the rule (through work specifications, the structure and diffusion of the public calls) and that of arbiters of the competition among social and business organisations that is inevitably generated by access to public calls. Outsourcing thus not only permits a maximum of flexibilisation in social intervention, 10

but also the production of a cliental network around public administration, making the social and business organisations both dependent on it and competing with each other. This cliental dynamic, made of favours and inside information, knows no difference in political colours and is very clearly produced by personal ties. As a worker affected by the shut down of services explains:
I think this is also very much down to the kind of relation you have, with what local government worker and what people in the organisations. For sure, in theory the basic principles of transparency must be respected, all organisations must be treated equally (she smiles) But theres always an amount of external negotiation, according to what are the possibilities for each organisation at a certain point, or to what extent it happens behind closed doors, and then the work description changes. (Interview with social worker, may 2008) And [the opening of new CEPIs] coincide with trade deals and international strategies Because theres hardly any Paraguayans, and suddenly a centre for Paraguayans opens why is that? (Interview with social workers, may 2008)

The effect on social organisations is devastating: small rivalries multiply, collaboration becomes riddled with mistrust, and competition (often in very unequal conditions) becomes the tonic among non-profit organisations. 4. Propaganda use The neoliberal conversion of social intervention we have outlined so far comes with a use of each publicly-funded action for propaganda purposes. Thus, the media events that can be organised become just as or more important than the action itself. Each one is a propaganda opportunity for the party in government and, in particular, for the politician directly responsible, expected to produce the corresponding electoral effects. A good example in this regard is the evolution of the Plan Madrid Legal Aid against Racism Service (SAJ). In 2006, the Coalition of European Cities against Racism and Xenophobia, coordinated by UNESCO, chose Madrid to host its annual meeting and to organise a cycle of international forums, meetings and festivals. This supposes that Madrid will be the European city against racism for a few months; therefore, it must get ready for the event. Plan Madrid has just been approved and, in this framework, the Legal Aid against Racism Service is opened. A worker recounts:
We started in February 2006. A partnership between the Madrid local authority and the Bar Association was signed. I think Madrid was European City Against Racism or something at the time or UNESCO cities something I dont know, there was some event, and Madrid had to demonstrated how big it was in the fight against racism. When SAJ was presented the TV came, all the media, the mayor, Ana Botella, the head of the Bar Association

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At the start, legal advice and information about racism is funded, and legal aid is also offered: there is a team of lawyers to follow the cases in court. Only a month later, UNESCO declares Madrid a model in the fight against racism: in a note dated March 20 2006, munimadrid.org, the official webpage of the Madrid local authority, proudly displays that piece of news. The UNESCO events go on until March 2007. Less than a year later, in February 2008, the partnership with the Bar Association that sustained the service is suspended. Without secure funds, the Bar Association offers to lawyers working in the service the possibility of being reintegrated into the already existing general legal advice offices: it is not only the provision of specific attention that disappears, therefore, but above all the possibility of taking cases to court. In short: an internationally vaunted service loses interest as soon as its propaganda potential has been exploited. Once the cameras have stopped flashing, it can be allowed to fade away. From the propaganda point of view, the cycle of openings and closures matter little: each new opening offers a new occasion to call the press, and each closure do not necessarily prevent the closes resources to carry on figuring in the list of actions of the government in charge. Thus, in the spring of 2008, with SAJ suspended, the Translation Service transformed into a call centre, the Temporary Shelter and Care for People of Sub-Saharan Origin programme having a restricted opening after two months shut, the Coexistence School set to close in June 2008, and the Migration and Intercultural Coexistence Observatory with staff reductions announced, Plan Madrid carried on presenting itself as a complete plan with 37 different ongoing projects with great pride. This propaganda use of social intervention, where the news matters more than the impact of the work, is not even something exclusive to Plan Madrid. Let us think, for example, of Younger Night, an initiative against juvenile alcohol consumption. What is there behind all the publicity that surrounds it? The extension in the opening times of sports facilities for a few hours over the weekend, with ambient music. Period. 5. Quantitative efficiency
The greatest leap for social services in recent years takes place when public administration pose it in such a way that the notions of efficacy and efficiency that I was referring to play a preponderant role. () Just like some years, some decades ago, the efficiency and efficacy of public function based essentially on personnel expansion was simply taken for granted, nowadays this is no longer so. () If we demand that a machine produces I dont know how many cars or pens, or that a cleaner cleans X square metres, why shouldnt we, and perhaps even more rightfully, that a civil servant or civil worker, even if not a servant, should produce, should fulfil, should accomplish many units of production and service, and do it well too.

Thus spoke Florencio Martn, General Director for Elderly People of the Madrid local authority, at a debate organised by the Social Exclusion Observatory in November

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2008 about the privatisation of social services. As we have already suggested, the neoliberalisation of social services presupposes its organisation according to the enterprise model, and this entails not only its flexibilisation and outsourcing, but also a valuation of actions according to efficiency and efficacy criteria. At least that is the theory. Practice, however, is different:
When I have meetings with companies in the elderly care home field, and they tell me, In the next four years we will double the capacity at care homes. And I reply, what does this mean? Because it means that if we have 4,000 vacancies, we will reach 10,000 So I ask, how long? Eight, ten years? And they go, No, in four. That is, its the logic of action, of making a decision and setting out straight away. (Florencio Martn, November 2008)

In practice, in other words, what imposes itself is essentially the priority of a certain, purely quantitative kind of efficiency, which reduces the valuing of the social effects of a given resource to the number of service units achieved with the least investment of funds (a raise in 6,000 vacancies in only four years, for instance), with no attention to the real social incidence of resources (how the elderly people were taken care of, which needs they had and what were met), and with no care to the fact that the importance ascribed to efficacy and efficiency can imply, in the words of Paco Roda, the deconstruction of the professions basic demands: warmth, proximity, empathy and attention. This logic can be clearly appreciated in the valuation documents of Plan Madrid and the Integration Plan: despite both having the promotion of equality as declared initial objectives, the valuation mechanisms do not include a single statistical study of the evolution of socioeconomic variables that would allow the appreciation of the decrease (or otherwise) of inequality between natives and migrants during the years of application. Beyond the generic words on the improvement of coinhabitation (Plan Madrid) and integration (Integration Plan), the valuation documents do not include qualitative studies of the effect of actions either. On the contrary, the stress falls entirely on the quantification of resources that were created and cases that were dealt with, always in absolute numbers, never in relation to the magnitude of needs. We can illustrate this with a passage from the speech by Fernndez-Lasquetty quoted above:
Following the directive of this plan, CAM has worked to offer to new madrileos the services that would allow a full and normalised integration to our society: the more than 1 million Health System members, the schooling of over 155,000 students, the continuous work with migrant support groups and associations, or the creation of 17 centres of migrant participation and integration centres are good evidence of this. Precisely these centres, the CEPIs, have the chief goal of becoming a meeting space for madrileos and migrants, favouring integration, training, participation and coexistence. Since their inception, around 400,000 people have taken part in some activity organised by them. Of these,

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around 30% were Spanish. In 2008, the CEPIs organise some 950 courses and job advice and training workshops, serviced 45,000 people in their legal and social areas and organised over 4,000 culture, leisure and sport activities, many of which directed at children and young second-generation migrants.

Does the 1 million Health system members cover the whole of new madrileos? Do they correspond to an equivalent raise in sanitation funds that could service a growing population without any loss of quality or an extension of waiting lists? Was the schooling of 155,000 students equally distributed to all of Madrids educative centres? What did the activities organised by the CEPIs bring to the 40,000 people who took part in them? This kind of question seems beyond the remit of the valuation process. The absolute primacy of quantitative efficiency in the determination of the value of social services in general, and social intervention in particular, functions, on the one hand, in detriment of labour conditions, who will have to do more for less pay and with less resources and, inevitably, worse; on the other hand, in detriment to users, who will receive a serialised care, as what matter is not so much responding to a need, but quantifying an appointment. On the other hand, the priority given to quantitative efficiency has another important effect: since all analysis of the real impact of the activities undertaken (excluding both qualitative valuations and any comparative study of needs and provision), it is possible to maintain a public discourse on the centrality of Equality and Integration in a context where the rise of social inequalities is evident. Perhaps the greatest hypocrisy lies in the fact that, at the same time that policies are developed that declare coexistence and integration between natives and migrants as their goals, migration policies are established that institutionalise rights inequality. Thus, for example, selective ID checks and police raids in all the places, streets and squares that are significantly frequented by migrants create a very distinct right to come and go within urban areas: according to a migrants origin and administrative situation (national, with a residence permit, undocumented), physical traits, accent and skin colour (the more clearly foreign, the more likely to be detained), but also to conjunctural political necessities. An evidence of that is the internal communication of Madrid police that was published by the newspaper Pblico in 16 February 2006: it was recommended to agents that they, in requesting internment in detention centres (the last step before deportation), to prioritise Moroccans, easier to expel as most of the transport is overland and the Moroccan government accepts deportations without problems; at the same time, they were asked to put Bolivians in a waiting list, as vacancies in flights to that country were limited at the time. Even graver is the issue of the legal mechanisms of access to citizenship, which create a long obstacle race from total clandestinity and the almost absolute denial of rights of sin papeles to obtaining full citizenship, with all the rights that come with it. In between, the migrant has to go through different kinds of ID cards, with a series of differential rights. The path that goes from card to card until full citizenship can be more or less long, more or less arduous, depending on luck, but also the country of 14

origin, its colonial history with Spain, and the kind of racism associated with the migrants particular phenotype. 6. Detain, contain, subject The sketch of the neoliberalisation of social services we have presented so far would not be complete if we did not add one last element, a fundamental one, in fact, the most characteristic in this process: the change in the function they perform. With the introduction of neoliberal logic in social services, gone is the idea that a model of accumulation carries with it an implicit asymmetry and generates inequalities that the state is obliged to palliate or compensate (redistribute), even in a very partial form, through the structures of the welfare state. This leads not so much to an elimination as a conversion of social services, with a reassignment of functions that presupposes, in fact, a greater specific weight of social intervention in them. What are these new functions that we are referring to? On the one hand, the detainment and contention of those points of instability in the social that could lead to disruptive phenomena that are potentially dangerous to the good functioning (competitive, productive) of population. In the same way that a certain medical framing of epidemics considers that it is less a matter of healing all the affected than of isolating the disease, so as to prevent contagion, separating the incurable, determining certain risk zones and establishing preventive measures and specific treatments for each etc., in neoliberal social intervention it is not so much a question of completely eliminating these points of instability, but of identifying them in time and containing them. In other words, it is not so much a matter of solving the problem, but of locating it, isolating it, preventing its proliferation and maintaining it within determined limits of tolerability. The system of antennas that Plan Madrid originally intended illustrates this idea of identifying points of instability very sharply:
- We were going to set up, I dont know if it happened or not, an antenna system. We wanted to create 25 to 50 important people in each district, socially important, it could be the guy from the newsstand on each corner, which would allow us to do a trimonthly survey with them In the end it was almost 500 people in the city of Madrid, very well identified, which would allow us to do this survey, and that would give us many leads. Besides, it was going to tell us that now this is the corner were people are gathering to drink, and not that one. Because for us to realised through official channels there will have had to be 25 complaints in the neighbourhood, the police will have to go through its internal process, first it acts as police, then as who-knows-what, and finally, when theyre desperate that theres no way in hell to stop people gathering there, they send a little memorandum to social services to see if they can do it And then social services acts, and the next year they send us a memorandum to check if we can send an intercultural mediator, and three years have gone by () [and the gathering] has moved somewhere else.

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- The processes are much quicker. - Much quicker. So we were setting up this system of antennas, people who know whats going on in the area. We wanted to interview them every three months, so they could give us the lowdown on what was happening. (Interview with Toms Vera, July 2008)

The second function that neoliberalised social services, as a priority, take on is that of subjecting those social strata who, in living under harsher conditions, can be more disruptive: on the one hand, individualising, that is, severing what each situation may have that is common to other situations; on the other, culpabilising, that is, making each one individually responsible for their own condition. The specific translation of these mechanisms of individualisation and culpabilisation in the case of migrants (and even more in that of sin papeles) is more and more the ideology of integration: the idea that, if one makes an effort to integrate that is, incorporates a set of codes and swallows the rage at racism and discrimination, accepting that being foreign entails a certain subalternity things will go well, and one will have papers and work. Or, negatively put: only are detained and expelled those bad migrants, who cannot be integrated and do not deserve to be amongst us. This is what each social worker must convey to migrants. And each contact between a social worker and a migrant must be an occasion in which the latter has to demonstrate being a good person, who is making an effort to integrate and deserves that favourable report, certificate or reference letter on which depend, not only obtaining this or that help, but also stopping an expulsion process from becoming an expulsion order, or the petition for regularisation on the grounds of arraigo [a system of regularisation based on the social integration of the subject](and hence the possibility of a residence permit) be favourably decided. The access to a series of basic rights is thus subject to a direct relationship between the migrant and those who can provide his expectations with an official stamp; and this relationship is measured according to the integration effort scale. There will be migrants who will play the game without really believing it, knowing that it is the hoop they have to jump in order to regularise their situation. I lie for my survival, Mamadou will say. But there will be others who will internalise the integration ideology. Moussa was freed after 25 days at the Detention Centre of Aluche (Madrid), during which period several people with a Spanish ID visited him; while he celebrated, he explained that they had freed him before the maximum 40-day limit because the centres director had realised that anyone with so many visitors had to be a good person. Most, in fact, oscillate between subjection and resistance. Moha, for example, complains about the NGO that he has been going to for two years: It is a piece of shit. They say that they help migrants, but they give you nothing. Its just psychologist, psychologist, as if we migrants were crazy!. Nevertheless, when asked what he thinks the NGO has given him in these two years, he says: They have civilised me. A little. I didnt know anything. It is possible that his choice of words, in this case, was perfectly random. But the colonial resonances of the transitive verb to civilise are food for thought.

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