Granting rights through illegalisation: EU citizens’ contested entitlements, actors’ logics and policy inconsistency in Belgium

ABSTRACT

Although Member states have increasingly relied on welfare policies to control intra-EU migration in the last decade, they often grant additional social rights to EU citizens who do not comply with residency requirements set by EU law, revealing a gap between declared restrictive aims and actual inclusive measures. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews in Belgium, this article analyses the interests and logics of the plurality of institutional and civil society actors on the welfare-EU migration nexus, suggesting that policy inconsistency resulted from the struggle of these – conflictive – logics. In doing so, the paper also reveals how the category of ‘illegal EU migrants’ has been institutionally produced ‘from below’, with healthcare providers, welfare bureaucracies and pro-immigrant organisations – rather than ‘the State’ – taking the lead in that process.

KEYWORDS:

• EU citizenship
• illegality
• policy inconsistency
• Belgium
• social rights

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The right of everyone to social security (Article 9), to an adequate standard of living (Article 10), and to enjoy the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health (Article 12).

2. Part I, on the right of everyone to enjoy the highest possible standard of health (Point 11), the right of everyone without adequate resources to social and medical assistance (Point 13), and on the right of everyone to benefit from social welfare services (Point 14).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberta Perna

Roberta Perna holds a PhD in Political Sociology from the University of Torino. She is postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Public Goods and Policies of the Spanish National Research Council, where she conducts her research on the welfare-mobility nexus from a comparative and multi-level perspective, and on the politics of health-related deservingness in contemporary Europe.