Social Protection as Migration Control: The Expulsion of Undeserving EU Migrants

In the dual context of increased Central and Eastern European migration after 2004 and the global financial and economic crisis after 2007, several Northern European Member States have implemented (or debated) reforms of their welfare regimes designed to restrict access to migrants coming from other EU Member States (Lafleur and Stanek, 2017). In spite of the mounting evidence that benefits play only a limited role on migration decisions (see among others Kvist, 2004; Giulietti and Wahba, 2012; ICF GHK, 2013; OECD, 2013), debates surrounding so-called “welfare tourism” and the fiscal cost of migration are intensifying in different parts of the EU. However, with the economic and financial crisis, welfare policies are increasingly being turned into instruments for limiting the mobility of EU migrants. This paper explores the terrain between North Western “Eurostars” and Eastern “euro-villains”, where there is a multiplicity of ways of experiencing the status of undocumented EU migrant. Focusing on EU citizens from older Member States whose mobility became contentious after the beginning of the financial and economic crisis, we aim to show that restrictions to the “mobility of the poor” is an EU-wide phenomenon that transcends specific national and ethnic groups in Europe. Drawing on recent literature on undocumented migration, we show how the use of welfare by poor EU migrants leads to their depiction as a group that is “undeserving” of the right to freedom of movement. Unlike third country nationals, poor EU migrants are often not deportable and therefore unaware of the need to develop strategies to demonstrate “deservingness” (Chauvin and Garcés, 2014) that could stabilize their legal position in the receiving Member State. We describe this peculiar status in terms of “precariousness” (Goldring, Berinstein and Bernhard, 2009) to illustrate the discrepancies in rights among individual EU migrants who all lost their residence permit.