Southern European Migrants in Belgium: From “Heroes” to “Welfare Shoppers”

Belgium has gone through both political and economic instability in recent years but its economy has resisted better than most other Member States’. The country has also experienced a strong increase in the arrival of newcomers from Southern Europe. The main purpose of this paper is to describe and analyse policy measures and public debates regarding the control and management of these populations. We first briefly look at how the EU integration process has been accompanied by a categorisation of migrants that at first only distinguished between EU and non-EU citizens and later distinguished within the latter category between desirable and undesirable EU migrants. This process of classification between desirable and undesirable EU migrants have led Belgian authorities to implement stricter immigration and integration policies designed to keep the former out while still appearing attractive to the latter. We will then focus on one specific policy implemented since the beginning of the crisis which consists in a large-scale effort to remove residence permits to EU jobseekers who claim social security benefits in Belgium. We analyse the effects of this policy that has affected a great number of Central and Eastern European migrants on the one hand, but also the new Southern European EU migrants. We show that Belgium’s strict welfare provisions not only limit the free mobility of workers in times of crisis, it also stigmatizes new EU migrants as welfare shoppers.