Welfare migration? Free movement of EU citizens and access to social benefits

Abstract

This article analyzes the political impact of the European Court of Justice’s (ECJ) case law concerning the free movement of EU citizens and their cross-border access to social benefits. Public debates about ‘welfare migration’ or ‘social tourism’ often fluctuate between populist hysteria and outright denial, but they obscure the real political and legal issues at stake: that ECJ jurisprudence incrementally broadens EU citizens’ opportunities to claim social benefits abroad while narrowing member states’ scope to regulate and restrict access to national welfare systems. We argue that legal uncertainty challenges national administrations in terms of workload and rule-of-law standards, while domestic legislative reforms increasingly shift the burden of legal uncertainty to EU migrants by raising evidentiary requirements and threatening economically inactive EU citizens with expulsion. We illustrate this argument first with a brief overview of the EU’s legal framework, highlighting the ambiguity of core concepts from the Court’s case law, and then with empirical evidence from the UK, Germany and Austria, analyzing similar domestic responses to the ECJ’s jurisprudence. We conclude that EU citizenship law, while promising to build the union from below on the basis of equal legal entitlements, may, in fact, risk rousing further nationalism and decrease solidarity across the union.