Br J Sociol
September 2023
In spite of the existence of an extensive national and supranational legal framework, European Union (EU) citizens who exercise their right to freedom of movement to work in another Member State face numerous hurdles in accessing social protection. While recent scholarship on street-level bureaucracy and on migration and welfare has shed light on the role of discretion and stereotypes in access to rights, little is known about the processes through which such hurdles are overcome. In this article, we focus on a specific strategy which is the recourse to what we call "welfare brokers".
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImmigrants and family members in the home and host societies experience inequalities in access to social protection. Focusing on healthcare, we demonstrate that immigrant families today respond to healthcare needs of family members here and there through four cross-border strategies. We show that immigrants select and articulate these different strategies to assemble transnational health care arrangements.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFollowing the financial and economic crisis, welfare policies across the EU are increasingly becoming instruments for limiting the mobility of certain EU migrants. In this article, 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'.
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