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ABSTRACT
Free movement of persons (FoM) is a key topic in current research on European integration’s effects on social justice and national welfare states. These debates have focused almost exclusively on FoM as the right to entry, and neglected the correlative right to exit. As a consequence, mainstream political science and public policy research has paid very little attention to welfare state-related implications of extensive emigration in several EU member states. This article argues that emigration should be incorporated into the FoM and welfare states research agenda, so as to better comprehend the relationship between FoM and welfare policy and politics, and to advance our understanding of how FoM alters national welfare boundaries. It discusses some of the conceptual limitations resulting from studying FoM exclusively in terms of entry, and advances more specific proposals for including emigration into the wider research agenda.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful for useful comments from the three anonymous JEPP reviewers, and for valuable feedback on earlier versions of this paper from the participants in the fworkshop ‘Is Europe Unjust’ at the European University Institute (with special thanks to Frank Vandenbroucke and Andrea Sangiovanni); Fabio Wolkenstein; Vladimir Bogoeski; and Tübingen colleagues. Additional thanks to Pieter Vanhuysse for inspiring discussions on the topic.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 MSs could over time experience both situations. E.g. Spain saw large-scale immigration from South-East Europe before 2008 but has since experienced significant emigration (of non-Spanish EU citizens and Spaniards). Equally, aggregate emigration must not be significant for there to be substantial pressures and concern relating to emigration of certain groups or sectors, especially at the regional level.
2 Though this is not solely the outcome of out-migration – but a combination thereof with low fertility and life expectancy rates – emigration significantly contributes (e.g. www.populationeurope.org).
4 A study that does account for negative costs, found ‘that between 1995 and 2011 European immigrants endowed the UK labour market with human capital that would have cost £14 billion if it were produced through the British education system’ (Dustmann and Frattini, Citation2014, p. F595).
5 There is a risk involved in framing free movers as ‘resources’ that should be taken seriously: it can serve to commodify them. Nevertheless, when we adopt a non-ideal view of welfare states, neither ‘rights’ nor ‘decommodification’ captures the full reality. In the political economic logic of self-reproducing welfare systems, populations are resources.
6 E.g. C-419/16 – Federspiel; Case C-20/12 – Giersch.
7 It goes without saying that skill drain also raises critical normative questions regarding MSs reciprocity (Sangiovanni, Citation2013), such as whether MSs of destination are indebted to MSs of origin, in view of their benefiting from the latter’s public spending on education – or whether this is balanced in their absorption of unemployed from emigration MSs. Given space constraints, I cannot go further into this here.
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Cecilia Bruzelius
Cecilia Bruzelius is Junior Professor of European Public Policy in the Institute of Political Science at the University of Tübingen