Following 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’. Overall, this article
– based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted with Italian migrants in Belgium –
expands our understanding of undocumented migration by demonstrating how
arbitrary and intimidating bureaucratic processes undermine the exercise of EU
citizenship.
Over the past two decades, sending states have greatly increased their interest in maintaining strong connections with their citizens abroad. The worldwide adoption of external voting – understood not only as an electoral procedure that allows some citizens to cast their vote outside the national territory but also as an acknowledgement that an emigrant status is compatible with polity membership – illustrates this phenomenon. Why do states enfranchise citizens abroad? In this article, I seek to answer this question by comparing the evolution of the debates on the extension of voting privileges to citizens residing abroad in Mexico, Italy and Belgium. My central argument is that a combination of variables shapes the development of external voting in different parts of the world, as well as the content of these laws. These include emigrant lobbying, home states' desires to stimulate emigrant loyalty for economic purposes and, most importantly, the evolution of domestic politics. In discussing these variables, I also shed light on how one can shape the adoption of external voting legislation to control the impact of votes cast abroad.
How did Mexican migrants react to the opportunity to formally partici-pate for the first time in home country politics during the 2006 Presidential Election? In this paper, we attempt to explain the low level of migrant voter registration in home country elections. Grounding ourselves on the existing literature on voter turnout, we verify two hypotheses that focus (1) on the role of Mexican authorities, and (2) on the interest of migrants and migrant associations in home country politics. Building on the case of Mexico, the paper concludes with proposing a series of variables upon which we suggest research could focus in order to assess migrant voter turnout in home country elections.
In this volume, we have demonstrated that-since its inception in 2008-the global financial and economic crisis has strongly impacted migration flows to/from/within the European Union as well as the way policy-makers and the public have reacted to them. While we have noted an intensification of South-North migration flows in all the case studies, the political reaction of Northern European receiving countries to this increased mobility has often seemed unrelated to the actual size of the phenomenon. Similarly, Southern European countries of origin have also adopted diverse responses, ranging from indifference to active engagement towards the rising level of departure of their citizens. Over the past few years, the issue of the mobility of EU citizens has become increasingly salient and controversial. As demonstrated in this volume, the arrival of Southern Europeans has often failed to trigger the same level of animosity in destination countries as that of post-accession migrants from Central and Eastern Europe. Moreover, the renewed influx of asylum seekers to the EU, which intensified exponentially in the summer of 2015, has been seen to precipitate similar high levels of hostility. South-North flows of EU citizens, however, pose a series of questions for the future of migration in the EU: are we witnessing a repetition of the massive South-North migrations that took place two generations ago? Is migration a principal strategy to cope with the effects of crises within the European Union? How is
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