Beyond the rights-bearing mobile EU citizen

Abstract

This chapter explains how the combination of EU, national, and transnational regulations in our study generate various different assemblages of rights, with different regulatory logics of inclusion and exclusion for key ‘categories’ of migrants in four social security areas (unemployment, family benefits, health insurance, and pensions). The chapter first reviews the EU regulations, before setting out the distinctive characteristics of the transnational regulation of social security between each of our country pairs. Within country pairs we found that informal regulatory practices were adopted to strongly privilege particular forms of employment and assemblages of rights for EU migrants, with strong sedentarist criteria of selectivity especially in the Western European member states. Across our country pairs, we found that there were only very limited policy areas where portability regulation was straightforward, and these also tended to privilege particular forms of regular, full-time employment. Residency requirements stemming from EU law on the rights of free movement could in practice make access and portability difficult, especially for more mobile migrants, making social security a privilege rather than a right.