According to EU law, EU citizens enjoys an individual right to move and reside freely in the territory of the Member States. The manner in which this freedom is exercised and by whom has increasingly become a politicized topic with various actors calling for the introduction of restrictive measures to curb and ideally control the movement of EU citizens. There is an emerging discourse that claims that only the mobility of certain EU citizens is desirable. Such calls are part of legal and political discourses on issues such as poverty migration or social benefits tourism. The paper seeks to understand how discourses about the mobility of EU citizens (who should move, under what conditions etc.) are mirrored in the case law of the Court of Justice. The demands made by the UK Prime Minister David Cameron in relation to the recasting of the rules on free movement of workers and the attempt to limit access to welfare benefits will be taken as a starting point of analysis. The paper will then analyse the recent case law concerning a) access to social rights in the host member state and b) the expulsion of EU citizens. The aim is to understand to what extent we can speak of managed mobility in relation to EU citizens and what categories of citizens are mainly affected.
