Welfare Migration? Free Movement of EU Citizens and Access to Social Benefits

This paper analyzes the domestic impact of the European Court of Justice’s 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 of a real phenomenon: ECJ jurisprudence incrementally broadens EU citizens’ opportunities to claim social benefits abroad and narrows member states’ scope to regulate and restrict access to national welfare systems. We provide a brief overview of the EU legal framework and highlight the ambiguity of core concepts from the Court’s case law before turning to domestic political responses. National administrations, we argue, are challenged by legal uncertainty in terms of workload and rule of law standards, whereas domestic legislative reforms increasingly aim at shifting the burden of legal uncertainty to EU migrants, e.g. by raising evidential requirements and threatening economically inactive EU citizens with expulsion. The argument is illustrated by empirical evidence from the UK, Germany and Austria.