Struggles over social rights: Restricting access to social assistance for EU citizens

Abstract

The legal category under which EU citizens exercise their right to free movement – worker, jobseeker, student or economically inactive - determines access to social rights in the host state and leads to differential inclusion in the welfare state. The right to equal treatment in relation to welfare entitlements has been subject to constant litigation before the European Court of Justice, leading to the refinement of the conditions under which migrant EU citizens can access welfare and the implications of such requests for their right to reside in an EU state. Moreover, while the conditions of access to an EU host state's welfare system are set at the EU level, the delivery of welfare takes place at the national and local levels, making national administrations and bureaucrats important actors in the governance of welfare. The aim of this article is to tease out the relationship between different levels of jurisdiction in the governance of access to the welfare state. We rely on data from 11 Member States in which we monitored the application of the relevant EU legislation and case law during the time frame 2016–2020. The main trends we discern are a growing interdependence between immigration and welfare authorities and a move towards the systematic control of all EU applicants for social assistance in several states. We argue that these developments are facilitated by the turn in the CJEU's jurisprudence that limits entitlement to welfare for economically inactive EU citizens and emphasises conditionality and legal residence as the main axes determining access to the welfare state.