1.1 Setting the Scene: the dissertation in context In most developed nations immigration has become a defining characteristic of open, interconnected, and interdependent economies. The European Union (EU) is one particular example of this in action, where the widening and deepening of European integration has created a unique system of mobility for its citizens. European citizens have the right to live and work in any Member State of the Union, and under EU law, mobile citizens have a range of rights afforded to them under the rules governing freedom of movement, such as equal access to the tax and benefit systems in which they reside. However, the extent to which European Union (EU) mobile citizens1 can or should be able to access the welfare systems of their host Member State is a controversial and highly sensitive political issue, one that has sparked heated public debates concerning the sustainability of increasing immigration and generous welfare states. While freedom of movement was broadly supported in the past and is widely considered the most important achievement of European integration (Vasilopoulou and Talving, 2018; Lutz, 2020; Sojka et al., 2023), following the financial crisis of 2008 and mounting fiscal pressures on states, arguments of who should be included and who should be excluded in order to preserve the advantages of the welfare state have come to the fore (Mulligan, 2017). Deciding on the specific boundaries to identify who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’ continues to be a major point of political contention and is typically defined by polarised viewpoints, to the extent that freedom of movement has become a critical source of tension across the EU and is arguably one of the key drivers of increasing Euroscepticism (Lutz, 2020; Blauberger et al., 2021). For example, the governments of three EU member states and one former – the United Kingdom (UK), Germany, the Netherlands, and Austria – wrote a joint letter to express concerns over ‘welfare tourism’ and called 1 European citizens who move across borders but within EU member states or European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries are typically referred to by EU Institutions as ‘mobile citizens’ rather than migrants. However, an immigrant is merely a person who moves from one geographical region to another, and the vast majority of migration never actually takes place across a border but rather internally within a country (McAuliffe and Triandafyllidou, 2021). For the purpose of this dissertation therefore, I use terms such as mobile citizen, intra-EU labour migrant, and immigrant somewhat interchangeably depending on the chapter and the context in which ‘human mobility’ is being discussed. 1 Introduction
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