Abstract Freedom of movement is a fundamental principle of the European Union (EU) and yet this key pillar of European integration has become a topic of controversy as member states find their labour markets and social security systems under pressure. Despite heated public debates, empirical insight into the role of immigration in shaping contemporary welfare systems at the macro-level is rather limited, and so this article explores the extent to which intra-EU labour mobility leads to changes in social welfare provision. A key reason why this question remains unanswered is that a lack of specific indicators on intra-EU labour migration renders the relationship difficult to study. Thus, this article expands upon previous literature by utilising data from the EU-LFS in order to analyse this previously ‘missing’ population of interest. For the welfare state, we disaggregate social welfare effort into separate subdomains allowing us to capture specific programme-related changes across countries. Additionally, we complement spending data with replacement rates data on unemployment benefits and social assistance benefits. Our results show that intra-EU labour migration, in particular from Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states, is positively associated with several subdomains of social spending. This positive association is also represented in the unemployment and social assistance replacement rates, suggesting that CEE labour migration is linked with increasing generosity of welfare states across 16 European countries. We find evidence to support Embedded Liberalism, that governments in open economies expand the welfare state in order to insure citizens against the labour market risks incurred and conclude that European welfare states seem to be resilient in the face of increasing intra-EU labour migration. Keywords: free movement, labour migration, welfare state, social policy, European Union Acknowledgements This chapter is co-authored with Olaf van Vliet, the PhD dissertation author (C. Fenwick) has made the largest contribution and as such is recognised as the first author of this article. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the ILS symposium, “Challenges to European Integration: welfare states and free movement in the EU” in Leiden, The Netherlands (2018) and the ECPR Joint Sessions Workshop on “Migrants’ Access to Welfare in Times 4 Intra-EU Labour Mobility and the Welfare State: An Empirical Analysis of Embedded Liberalism in the Context of Free Movement
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