Granting rights through illegalisation: EU citizens’ contested entitlements, actors’ logics and policy inconsistency in Belgium

Although Member states have increasingly relied on welfare policies to control intra-EU migration in the last decade, they often grant additional social rights to EU citizens who do not comply with residency requirements set by EU law, revealing a gap between declared restrictive aims and actual inclusive measures. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews in Belgium, this article analyses the interests and logics of the plurality of institutional and civil society actors on the welfare-EU migration nexus, suggesting that policy inconsistency resulted from the struggle of these–conflictive–logics. In doing so, the paper also reveals how the category of ‘illegal EU migrants’ has been institutionally produced ‘from below’, with healthcare providers, welfare bureaucracies and pro-immigrant organisations–rather than ‘the State’–taking the lead in that process.