Abstract :
[en] In the dual context of increased Central and Eastern European migration and of the global financial and economic crisis, several Northern European Member States have implemented (or debated) reforms of their welfare regimes to restrict access to migrants coming from other EU Member States. As the debates on the so-called “welfare tourism” are intensifying in different parts of the EU, we can observe a growing trend among Member States to use welfare policies as instruments to limit the mobility of certain EU migrants. This stance is best illustrated with Prime Minister Cameron’s demand for four-year ban on EU migrants claiming in-work benefits.
In Belgium, too, EU citizens have been particularly affected by this adverse context as the Migration Office (Office des Etrangers) has intensified controls against EU residents receiving welfare benefits. With this policy, authorities have been using a restrictive interpretation of the European Directive 2004/38 that allows Member States to remove residence permits from EU citizens who represent an “unreasonable burden on state finances”. As a consequence, the number of EU citizens expelled from Belgium on a yearly basis has jumped from 343 to 2,042 between 2010 and 2014.
In this paper, we propose to focus on those EU citizens who see their freedom of circulation in the EU restricted after claiming social protection in their country of residence. Relying on fieldwork conducted with Italian and Romanian migrants who experienced the removal of their residence permit, we discuss the different resilience strategies of those EU citizens faced with the legal obligation to leave: such strategies include returning to the homeland, refusing to leave, mobilizing the support of migrant organizations, introducing individual appeals, and seeking to regularize their administrative status. In particular, we shall focus on the experience of EU migrants who have decided to stay in Belgium and experience the status of an undocumented EU migrant. This peculiarity of this status is visible in three respects: 1) expulsion is not enforced by local authorities, 2) migrants continue to be able to circulate between their homeland and the country where they no longer have a residence permit, and 3) they have a possibility to regularize their status if they can demonstrate to municipal authorities that they no longer represent “a burden” on Belgium’s public finances. Overall, confronting our data to the rich literature on undocumented third country nationals, we discuss the limits of EU citizenship as experienced by those who are denied the right to free movement.
This paper relies primarily on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (in progress) conducted with Italian and Romanian migrants in Brussels and with individuals of the same nationality who decided to leave Belgium and return to their home country after the removal of their residence permit. Additional fieldwork includes semi-directed interviews with civil society organizations, trade unions, and consular authorities. The data collection process started in May 2014 and is expected to be finished in May 2016.
