Conceptualizing Responsibility Regarding Non‐EU Temporary Migrants’ Welfare in Romania: Control, Regulation and Network Governance Dilemmas in a New Immigration Country

ABSTRACT This article analyses the language of accountability and responsibility regarding the welfare of non‐EU migrants in Romania. Romania is a country with little experience in receiving economic migrants. Although legal provisions are applied in immigration and work inspection offices, migrants’ employment, residence and welfare are largely governed by less formal practices, enacted by a mix of state and commercial actors. This network governance has a transnational dimension, because staffing agents from workers’ countries of origin remain involved in the provision of care over long periods of time. Fuzzy understandings of rights and legal obligations, as well as more vernacular and improvised rules, are an integral part of a network governance that is being constructed in the everyday encounters of non‐EU workers with various public and private actors. This article explores how meanings and practices of responsibility over migrants’ welfare circulate and are negotiated between such actors.