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The interdependency of border bureaucracies and mobility intermediaries: a street level view of migration infrastructuring
Introduction Following the interest of this special issue into the ways in which people migrate, most notably the meso-level actors and organisations that facilitate, shape, enable mobility aspirations, this article proposes a street-level view...
Introduction
The right to free movement of workers is one of the fundamental pillars of the European Union (EU). This notwithstanding, the conditions under which it occurs have been subject to considerable political debates between EU Member States in recent years. Free movement played a major role in Brexit and it is likely to continue to exert a divisive influence over the EU in the years to come. This makes it important to try to understand the political dynamics driving the tensions around free movement. We argue that the political tensions associated with free movement cannot be understood without paying close attention to the institutions and politics of modern welfare states in Europe. In particular, it is necessary to explore the role of institutional characteristics and reforms of European welfare states as sources of discontent with the current rules for free movement and, in particular, with the current way of coordinating the social protection of mobile workers among EU Member States.
Under the current rules for free movement, EU citizens enjoy the unrestricted right to move to and take up employment in any other EU country and – as long as they are ‘workers’ – have full and equal access to the host State’s national welfare system. While EU workers’ access to social protection in host States has always been contentious, the enlargement of the EU and the subsequent rise in intra-EU labour mobility over the past 20 years have generated increasing tensions around the consequences and legitimacy of free movement of workers.
It should not, therefore, have come as a great surprise when, in recent years, a number of EU Member States, including the UK (when it was still a Member), Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands proposed to change the current rules on EU workers’ access to welfare benefits. In the United Kingdom, it is clear that these issues around free movement and access to social protection for EU workers fed into the Brexit debate that ultimately resulted in the UK’s decision to leave the EU. The continuing debates in and between the 27 EU Member States make it important to ask and analyse whether and why the characteristics of national welfare institutions, including the common welfare reform trends over time, generate tensions with the free movement of workers, and – if there are genuine tensions – how they can be reduced to help ensure the political sustainability of unrestricted intra-EU labour mobility in the future.
In this chapter, we focus on one specific issue that has been at the heart of recent and ongoing debates about EU workers’ access to welfare benefits: the exportability of child benefits. Under the current EU rules for free movement and social security coordination across Member States, an EU worker can “export” family benefits to their children and other family members resident in the home country3. While some EU Member States have demanded a change to these rules – and Austria already implemented a more restrictive ‘indexation’ policy (discussed later) – others appear to prefer that they are maintained.4 This chapter provides an institutional perspective and analysis of this issue and debate. We argue that the political conflicts about exporting child benefits are, at least in part, due to a fundamental tension between the ‘employment-based’ institutional logic that regulates EU workers’ access to child and family benefits and the ‘residence-based’ institutional logic that underpins family policy in an increasing number of Member States.