migration policy

by Gianna Maria Eick and Christian Albrekt Larsen

Particularly the Covid-19 crisis has demonstrated migrant workers’ key role in the functioning of European labour markets and services. The crisis has also exposed many migrants’ interlinked vulnerabilities, including their concentration in precarious work, thinner financial safety nets, and insecure social rights. Still, in political and public debates, migrants’ are often framed as a threat to European countries, and they have already lost social rights in some countries in recent years. In this context, welfare chauvinism, the attitude that migrants should be excluded from social rights, increasingly polarises the continent.

by Dion Kramer and Anita Heindlmaier

Conceived in Maastricht almost thirty years ago, EU citizenship was initially thought of as a mere symbolic addition to existing rights. In the following decades, interventions by the European Court of Justice led many to believe that EU citizenship could emerge as a truly fundamental status capable of conferring concrete social rights to EU citizens crossing borders within the European Union. This promise of a social citizenship beyond the nation-state is currently less tenable. The aftermath of the Great Recession and Brexit have shown the limits of EU citizenship as a status delivering to those most in need of its protection.

Category: migration policy

From Kafka to Kafka: EU Citizenship and National Welfare Bureaucracies

by Dion Kramer and Anita Heindlmaier