Social Policy Reforms as Migration Control: The Case of EU Citizens in Belgium

Following the financial and economic crisis, welfare policies across the EU are increasingly becoming instruments for limiting the mobility of certain EU migrants. In this paper, we focus on EU citizens who see their freedom of movement in the EU being restricted after they have applied for social assistance or unemployment benefits in their country of residence. Doing so, we conceptualize undocumented EU migration by means of the concepts of “non-deportability”, “deservingness” and “precariousness”. Overall, this paper — based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Italian migrants in Belgium — expands our understanding of undocumented migration by demonstrating how arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes undermine the exercise of EU citizenship.