Whereas the right to move freely in the EU was originally reserved to workers, it has been extended to all EU citizens through Treaty reforms, secondary legislation and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Justice (ECJ). Recent political controversies about alleged “benefit tourism” and a new “reactionary phase” (Spaventa 2015) of ECJ citizenship jurisprudence, however, have resulted in significant restrictions regarding EU migrants’ access to national welfare systems. These logics of “opening” and “closure” (Ferrera 2005; Martinsen and Vollaard 2014) are both present – and conflicting – in the day-to-day implementation of EU free movement rules by national administrations. On the one hand, even though EU citizens’ right to reside abroad may be made conditional on having “sufficient resources”, national immigration authorities often effectively favor opening – e.g. by not expelling EU migrants without sufficient resources, or by not controlling them in the first place. On the other hand, welfare authorities follow the logic of closure when denying social benefits to EU migrants whose residence status is unclear or invalid. In our contribution, we will investigate Austrian and German administrative approaches to this inherent conflict. While both approaches differ greatly, we suspect that they produce a similar effect: increasingly, EU migrants are being tolerated as residents with precarious status and without access to minimum subsistence benefits.
