The borders of the political community (i.e. the state) are the borders of social rights. The erasure from the Permanent Residents' Register, which began in 1992, is an example of systematic exclusion from the community, thereby violating dignity and denying rights. Although the limitating of social rights and the illegalisation of persons are not central to social work, they are crucial to the ethics and mandate of the profession. The research question of the article is whether the borders of social rights are also the borders of social work. Theoretical concepts of racism and structural violence are applied. Social work studies and other studies that problematise limitation of the welfare state in different ways are presented. The ethnographic part of the article consists of statements by social workers about how they remember the erasure from the Permanent Residents’ Register when it was not yet recognized as a violation of human rights. The experiences of residents who were erased are drawn from other research.
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