1 Introduction: The European Way to Brexit

The Brexit referendum of 2016 marked the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, and so from its mechanisms of free movement. A shock to the rest of the continent, this seismic change owes much to the growing hostility towards European migration following the EU enlargement of 2004 and, later, to the increase in South-North flows due to the global financial crisis of 2008. For a long time at the periphery of intra-European migration trends, at the start of the twenty-first century the UK had become one of the main nodes of this regional system – a role which the country decided to repudiate. Such hostility was not framed so much in terms of generic xenophobia but, rather, as welfare chauvinism and, in turn, connected to a rejection of EU migrants – and migrants in general – as fellow citizens with full welfare entitlements (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). This chapter examines the last few decades of political and policy developments around migration and intra-European migration in the United Kingdom, the key trends that led to the (not so) unpredictable Brexit referendum, and the scenarios which have been set in motion with the UK-EU Agreement of 2020, following 4 years of wearying negotiations. In doing this, it contributes to a (re)assessment of Britain’s recent history and the extent to which this has been diverging from – or indeed influential for – wider European processes.

As will be argued, despite the strong sense of British exceptionalism which has informed UK discussions, some of the fundamentals underpinning the reshaping of its policies have much in common with what is happening elsewhere in the continent, with the stratification of welfare rights for different categories of migrants being used as a mechanism to regulate entry and settlement. Thus, what at political and institutional level appears yet as the major rupture within the European framework, may reveal itself as part of a wider trend among both Northern and Southern European countries: the reconfiguration of the welfare-migration nexus in even more restrictive terms. Chauvinistic welfare policies “operate as bordering practices”, with welfare provisions increasingly being “withdrawn from a group of people designated as undeserving” (Guentner et al., 2016:391). Within this race to the welfare bottom, we are witnessing not just a reduction of the entitlements for new migrants, but also an erosion of the rights of established foreign-born residents – both third-country nationals and EU citizens (D’Angelo & Gargiulo, 2021) – and a further racialisation of ideas of citizenship.

At the same time, the recent British history can be interpreted as the attempt of some political forces to disentangle the UK from what was perceived (or depicted) as an increasingly unmanageable EU migration regime. Here the term “regime” is used in the sense of “complex and multi-layered political regulations of migration that escape realist definition of the state as an acting entity” (Cvajner et al., 2018). The combined efforts of chauvinism and Euroscepticism have strived to reject the very idea of such a diffuse regulatory complexity, and to reassert the primacy of the national government on both external and internal forces. The British doctrine of a “hostile environment” for migrants (Goodfellow, 2020) has entailed a top-down, far-reaching strategy which required a wide range of public and private sector actors to fall in line with the implementation of rigid practices of “internal bordering” (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). Also in this case, however, the UK approach can be shown to be more quintessentially European than its own Governments would like to believe.

Bringing together these different perspectives, this chapter provides an original contribution to (re)assess not just Brexit, but the wider role of the UK in shaping the welfare-migration nexus across the European Union. This is achieved by critically examining the policy developments, political events and public debates from post-war Britain to the Boris Johnson Government of 2019–2022, drawing on a wide range of secondary sources and scholarly analyses. The following sections start by identifying welfare chauvinism as one of the founding principles of the post-war migration regime in the UK. This went hand in hand with ideas of marketisation and stratification of the labour market – both internally and internationally – which would be further developed by New Labour. The chapter then examines the emergence of the Austerity Agenda, in parallel with welfare restrictions for new EU arrivals and the consolidation of the “Hostile Environment” model in the early 2010s. Though also intended to pander Euroscepticism and the moral panic against European migrants, these developments had the effect of paving the way for the Brexit referendum which, in turn, created new possibilities for exclusionary welfare policies. In these respects, the role of the UK within the EU emerges as a crucial case study: not so much one of divergence, but of trend-setting; coherently with an ideological alignment and influence (Antonucci & Varriale, 2020) which, though often forgotten, dates back to the 1970s.

2 Post-war Britain: Between Welfare Chauvinism and European Marketisation

Post-World War II economic migration to Britain was characterised mostly by arrivals from its former colonies, particularly the Caribbean, South Asia and Ireland (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). Conversely, the role of immigration from the rest of Europe remained quite marginal for several decades, both numerically and in public discourses. In spite of some sizeable components, such as the Italian workers who settled since the 1950s (D’Angelo, 2007), the UK remained pretty much outside of the South-North intra-European migration system. This pattern had been actively encouraged by the British Nationality Act of 1948, which gave the right of settlement to anyone born in a British colony. The idea of the Commonwealth as a space of relative free movement and diffuse rights, however, was bound to be short-lived. Since the 1960s, the country saw the progressive introduction of immigration and nationality legislation aiming to restrict the eligibility of certain groups to live in the country and to access welfare rights (Williams, 2020). Hence, from the start, migration and welfare policies were inextricably entangled, with both dominant political parties sharing one major trait: welfare chauvinism, at least meant as the belief that “welfare benefits should be restricted to citizens” (Balch & Balabanova, 2016, p. 20). The concept of welfare chauvinism is also related to definitions of “who is considered part of the ‘community’ that produces/distributes welfare provisions and what such membership is based upon” (Keskinen et al., 2016, p.: 323).

As noted by Guentner et al., (2016, p. 396), Labour’s “enthusiasm for controls” in the 1970s, was going to be exceeded only by Margaret Thatcher’s Nationality Act in 1981, which created a highly stratified system of citizenship and entitlements. Many people, including children born and raised in the UK, saw their status demoted to “overseas citizens”, becoming effectively stateless (Runnymede Trust, 2019). As argued by Tyler (2009, 61) “the existence of populations of failed citizens within Britain is not an accident of flawed design”, but the foundation of a regime of post-imperial state racism which excludes or disqualifies specific populations from welfare and other rights. In the 1990s, successive laws by Tory and, later, Labour governments, further restricted access to benefits and services for migrant people. One key element in this process was the introduction of the principle of “no recourse to public funds” (NRPF): the requirement for new migrants “to support themselves as a condition of entry” (Dwyer et al., 2019:139). First emerged in the 1970s, NRPF was explicitly adopted by the Immigration and Asylum Act of 1999, excluding anyone subject to immigration controls from a range of welfare provisions, such as income support and housing benefits (Alberti, 2017).

Meanwhile, in 1973, the UK had joined the European Economic Community, the precursor of the European Union, seemingly marking a new era of modernization and the transition from the Empire/Commonwealth model to “a new transnational federation sharing sovereignty” (Holmwood, 2021). In recent times, the British presence in the EU has been depicted – both internally and across the continent – as uneasy and contentious, attracting particular hostility from the more conservative sectors of the political spectrum. However, at that point in time, membership of the European project was seen as a strategic move in pursuing the British liberal political agenda and its ambition for “increased market competition and privatization” (ibid.). In fact, it was a minority within the Labour party which was most strongly averse to EU membership – perceived as an obstacle to socialist reforms – and which in 1975 called for, and lost, a referendum on the issue. Only later did Conservative opposition emerge: firstly, against the evolution of the European project into a political and constitutional union, and secondly against the development of its social pillar, as conceived by socialist French Commissioner Jacques Delors. This opposition was epitomized by the “No. No. No.” speech of Margaret Thatcher, in 1990 (BBC, 2014). Over the following two decades, the UK opted out from many major European initiatives, such as the Schengen Area of borderless movement and, later, the Euro. Still, the UK has been much more than a reluctant partner; rather, for over 40 years there have been considerable reciprocal influences with the EU in the area of Social Policy. As noted by Hantrais (2018, p. 269), from the very start “the Commission relied heavily on British social policy specialists to coordinate the work of many of the European networks and observatories, particularly in the areas of family policy, parental leave, poverty and social exclusion, ageing and older people, and health”. With regard to welfare in particular, “the UK is also the country where neoliberal policies were first adopted on European terrain”, later influencing conservative and “Third Way” politicians across the whole continent (Keskinen et al., 2016, p. 325).

In all of this, and for a very long time, intra-European migration really was not part of the complex debate about EU membership. Even after joining, the arrivals of migrants from the continent saw only moderate increases till the end of the 1990s. These were largely made up of young people coming for study or work experiences, as well as professionals employed at the upper-end of the labour market. European citizens – often labelled as “expats”, rather than “migrants” – were not much of a target of anti-immigration concerns, which instead focused on Black, Muslim and other racialized communities, as well as on refugees. These groups were widely depicted as a source of social and cultural problems (Atkin & Chattoo, 2007) and as a potential burden on the State’s resources: a clear example of the “ethnonationalist” and racializing undertones which are often associated to wider sentiments of welfare chauvinism (Keskinen et al., 2016).

3 Global Britain at the Heart of the European Regime

At the start of the twenty-first century, the UK strived to present itself as one of the centres of a knowledge-driven, interconnected new world (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). The New Labour Britain of Tony Blair (1997–2007) often has been hailed as an era of openness to globalisation, diversity and international migration (Holden, 2001; L’Hôte, 2010). The reality is somewhat more complex. On the one hand, migration policy saw an acceleration of restrictive measures against migrants, with the Prime Minister even defending the tough stance of previous Tory governments as necessary to tackle racism (Guentner et al., 2016). On the other, New Labour discourses were marked by an emphasis on integration and racial equality and, at least rhetorically, were “strongly supportive of a policy of multiculturalism” (Sommerville, 2007). Such model of multiculturalism was characterised by a strong local dimension, supported through the funding of community projects and associations. This helped the burgeoning of ethnic minority and migrant-led organisations, which in many cases acted as local providers of targeted social support (D’Angelo, 2015), working complementarily – or in parallel – to public services. The role of migrant community organisations in providing state-approved legal, welfare and migration advice was an important mechanism to enable some of the most vulnerable to access their welfare rights and navigate a state bureaucracy otherwise exclusionary. From the mid-2000s, however, this approach was scaled down significantly in the name of “social cohesion”, with minority organisations accused of reinforcing divisions and resentment (D’Angelo, 2015) – a trend which would later lead the Conservative party to declare the “failure of multiculturalism”.

At macro-economic level, New Labour was committed to the management of migration for economic gain and within the context of a “Third Way” vision aspiring to combine “the flexibility of American labour markets with some European-style protections” (Gingrich & King, 2019:90). The economic expansion of those years helped to “mask more general class-based welfare retrenchment” (Guentner et al., 2016:396), counterbalanced by some measures to reduce in-work and child poverty. Within a globalising world, the UK began to reconsider its position between global and regional trends. The pursued model was one in which competitive global markets would source skilled professionals from all over the world to fill shortages in the UK – particularly in sectors such as Health and IT. From 2008, such mechanism was going to be managed through a restrictive Point Based System (BPS). Alongside this, the growing integration into the European system would allow the removal of migration routes for “less skilled” migrants, to be replaced by mobile workers from the poorest EU Member countries (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). At a time of relatively low unemployment, this was seen as an uncontentious strategy to generate further economic growth (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020:144). In this regard, Antonucci and Varriale (2020:47) argued that intra-EU mobility could be seen as an essential aspect of the UK’s “hegemonic role in Europe”, part of a wider European regime characterised by a differentiation between core (North) and peripheral (South) countries. Functional to this was also the “knowledge-based economy” paradigm, which started as a flagship New Labour policy to then become one of the pillars of the Lisbon Strategy (2000–2010) of the European Union. This implied the leading role of Northern European countries – such as the UK – to transform the EU into the “most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion” (European Council, 2020).

It is in this context that, following the EU enlargement of 2004, the Blair administration decided, unlike most other EU governments, not to impose temporary controls on migration from the new Member States of Central and Eastern Europe. As observed by Sobolewska and Ford (2020, p. 144), “the decision was arrived at with very little ministerial or cabinet discussion, and no public consultation”: something quite remarkable, considering its prominence in the public debates of the subsequent years. In fact, the effects of this decision proved to be quite different from what was expected. A study commissioned by the Home Office – and based on the assumption that other countries would also open-up – had estimated arrivals between 5,000 and 13,000 annually (Dustmann et al., 2003). Instead, between May 2004 and September 2008, the UK saw the arrival of over 900,000 people from the new Member countries, and particularly from Poland. This fed popular views of EU migration as unpredictable and unmanageable, also thanks to the relentless media campaigns of those years. Thus, when Bulgaria and Romania also joined the EU in 2007, the access to the labour market for citizens of those countries was restricted, amid concerns about their impact on public services and wages (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018).

The global economic crisis of 2008–2009 was going to bring further discontent, which, in turn, exacerbated anti-immigration sentiments. In other words, as revealed by an analysis of the British press by Balch and Balabanova (2016, p. 35) “welfare chauvinist ideas became more prevalent in the public debate when times were harder economically”. In 2010, the new Labour leader Gordon Brown promised to act on people’s concerns on immigration – famously promising more “British jobs for British workers”. His mixed messages on the topic, however, produced a “media disaster” (Goodfellow, 2020, p. 120), displeasing people at the opposite ends of the migration debates. This costed him, and the party, the 2010 election, opening the way to a new coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.

4 Austerity and the “Hostile Environment”

A coalition government was quite new in the UK political tradition and at first it was hard to see how the very different stances of the two parties – also with regard to the European Union – were going to be brought together. The “Austerity Agenda”, however, soon emerged as one of the defining features of that decade (Farnsworth & Irving, 2021). For the Conservatives in particular, the aftermath of the financial crisis was seen as an opportunity “to pursue long-term objectives of permanently shrinking the size of the welfare state” (Taylor-Gooby, 2016, p. 713), and doing that also by further limiting benefits to British citizens (Gingrich & King, 2019). Welfare chauvinism and, more generally, a redefinition of those who were “worthy” of support, gained further political credit, with Prime Minister David Cameron explicitly presenting migration and welfare policy as “two sides of the same coin” (Morris, 2018).

The immigration of EU nationals was increasingly seen as problematic, since their rights of movement and ability to access welfare derived directly from the EU Treaties, and so were much more difficult to regulate. The most contentious element was identified in “low-skilled” migrant workers, because of the assumption that they would “‘steal’ the jobs of the British working class” (Antonucci & Varriale, 2020, p. 47). This class element was intertwined with a national one, with major distinctions being made in public narratives between citizens of the old EU15 Member States on the one hand, and those of the new accession countries, mostly Eastern Europeans, on the other (McCarthy, 2018, p.2). British tabloids ran relentless media campaigns against Polish workers first, and against Bulgarians and Romanians later on. As observed by Fox et al. (2012, p. 691) cultural differences were explicitly invoked to justify a racialized exclusion which implied “degrees of whiteness” and further complicated the “legacy of institutionalised racism” which had characterised the migration policies of the past. By 2015, an Ipsos-Mori (2015) poll found the UK public had become increasingly concerned about EU membership. 60% of respondents wanted greater restrictions on free movement, with only 11% happy with the current arrangements. Among those who wanted more restrictions, over 70% mentioned pressures on public services and 60% believed EU free-movers came to the UK largely to claim welfare benefits.

Much of this debate was completely disconnected from the evidence. In fact, all available data and research showed the positive net contribution of these migrants to the economy and welfare of the UK (D’Angelo, 2019). Even official ministerial reports noted “little evidence of any statistically significant labour market displacement caused by EU migrants” (DBIS, 2014, p.41). The Government’s own independent Migration Advisory Committee suggested there was little indication of the UK welfare system being a pull factor for EU migration (MAC, 2014). Nonetheless, the narrative of EU migrants “stealing British jobs” and, at the same time, somewhat paradoxically, exploiting the welfare system, became stronger and stronger among the electorate and found very little political opposition across all parties, including Labour and the “Europhile” Liberal Democrats. As for the Tory party, this became increasingly divided between those who continued to see EU-membership as a political and, above all, economic necessity and those who wanted to ride the Eurosceptic and welfare-chauvinistic wave. This chasm was made all the more serious by the seemingly unstoppable rise of UKIP (UK Independence Party), the anti-immigration, anti-EU party lead by Nigel Farage.

The strategy of David Cameron to appease the electorate and its own MPs was twofold. Firstly, in January 2013, he promised that, should the Tory party secure an overall majority in the 2015 elections – an outcome at the time considered highly unlikely – the UK would hold an ‘in or out’ referendum on its EU membership. Secondly, he supported the introduction of a set of measures to restrict the access to welfare benefits for EU migrants (EEA), and particularly targeting job-seekers and their families (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018). Newly arrived EU-nationals were prevented from accessing Housing Benefits and Jobseeker’s Allowance (JSA), with the introduction of a minimum period of residence of 3 months. The implementation of a stricter Habitual Residence Test (HRT) for key means-tested benefits added a further level of discretion and bureaucratic burden, reducing welfare access and discouraging applications (D’Angelo & Gargiulo, 2021). Finally, the introduction of the Immigration Act 2014 saw the extension of “internal bordering” processes into all aspects of everyday life (Yuval-Davis et al., 2018). A wide range of public and private actors – including employers, landlords, banks and the National Health Services (NHS) – “found themselves legally obliged to undertake migration status checks on all those seeking to use their services or work with them” (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020, p. 169).

Overall, these measures led to the creation of what has been defined “The Hostile Environment” (Goodfellow, 2020). The term was initially coined by the then Home Secretary Theresa May, specifically to refer to expanded checks for “illegal” immigrants. The impact of this shift, however, was much more wide-ranging, gradually affecting most categories of migrants as well as Black and minority ethnic British citizens. As noted by Sobolewska and Ford (2020, p. 169) “when combined with Britain’s unusually complex citizenship and migration regimes […], and the lack of any universally held or accepted form of identification documents in Britain, this was a recipe for disaster”. In 2018, disaster took the shape of the so-called “Windrush scandal”, with hundreds of Caribbean-born residents being wrongly detained, deported and denied legal and welfare rights (Gentleman, 2019). An independent review on the scandal identified “the organisational factors in the Home Office which created the operating environment in which these mistakes could be made, including a culture of disbelief and carelessness when dealing with applications” as well as “an institutional ignorance and thoughtlessness towards the issue of race […] which are consistent with some elements of the definition of institutional racism” (Williams, 2020, p. 7).

In parallel to all this, intra-European migration patterns had started to change quite significantly, with a shift in their regional trajectories. The number of migrants from Eastern Europe had been declining since the end of the decade, due to the relative improvement of the economies in those countries (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2017). Instead, migration from Southern Europe, and especially from Italy and Spain, saw a significant growth after the 2008 economic crisis, with the difficulties encountered by those welfare and labour market systems persisting even after the global recovery. For its part, the United Kingdom, although also hit by the “global crunch”, continued to register an unemployment rate well below the European average. Its extremely flexible (indeed highly casualised) labour market made it relatively easy for newcomers to enter. This was particularly the case for those EU workers who could simply relocate to the country without having to find a job beforehand. The annual National Insurance Number (NINo) registrations of Spanish and Italian citizens, which in the early 2000s were both around 10,000, rose respectively to over 50,000 and over 40,000 by 2013 (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2017) and stayed high for the rest of the decade. Although Southern Europeans migrants remained off the radar of xenophobic and welfare-chauvinistic discourses, their contribution to the overall growth of EU-migration statistics helped sustaining anti-EU concerns. Overall, the number of EU-born migrants estimated to be living in the UK increased from 1.5 million in 2004 to 3.2 million in 2015.

5 Brexit: Reconfiguring the Migration-Welfare Nexus

After the surprise electoral victory of 2015, David Cameron had to follow through on his promise of a referendum on the exit of the UK from the European Union; what by that point had become widely known as Brexit. In spite of his Euroscepticism, the Prime Minister was not in favour of the country’s departure from the EU. His plan was to negotiate some concessions from the Brussels authorities and, on that basis, to secure a vote in support of a continued European membership. The “New Settlement” finally secured in February 2016 – and which would have automatically come into force if the UK had voted to “remain” – focused on welfare issues. A key part of this was the so-called Emergency Break, which would have allowed the British government to extend the waiting period before EU migrants could access non-contributory in-work benefits from 3 months to 4 years. Additionally, child benefits for children living abroad would be paid at a rate reflecting the standard of living in each country of origin, rather than at the UK rate (Kennedy, 2017): another aspect which had no financial relevance, but that had become contentious.

At that point, however, no amount of welfare reform would have appeased the anti-EU sentiments which had been unleashed and which had taken increasingly identarian tones. The Leave campaign led by Nigel Farage and by Conservative mavericks Michael Gove and Boris Johnson urged the electorate to “take back control”, with more than a hint to the country’s Imperial past, but also with scare stories about the potential entry of Turkey into the EU and the risk of the Mediterranean refugee crisis soon having a major impact on the British shores too. The latter was a typical example of Southern Europe being depicted as the “soft underbelly” of the regional migration system, with spurious suggestions that European “free movement” was somehow connected to refugee arrivals (as in the infamous “breaking point” poster campaign run by UKIP). Still, after years in which pundits and opinion polls (Curtice, 2016) had explained Brexit was an extreme scenario which was never going to materialise, the results of the referendum of June 23rd 2016 were received as a shocking surprise, even among those who had been campaigning for it (D’Angelo, 2019): 52% of UK voters came out in support of Brexit. According to a Lord Ashcroft (2016) poll, 80% of Brexiters saw immigrants as a “force for ill”, and exiting the EU was expected to bring better immigration regulations, improved border controls and a fairer welfare system.

Immediately after the vote, David Cameron resigned, to be succeeded by Theresa May. Her premiership was going to be entirely dominated by the negotiation of a Brexit Deal with the European Union. This was signed in Autumn 2018, but voted down a number of times by Parliament, eventually leading to May’s departure. It was going to be Boris Johnson – the third Conservative Prime Minister in a matter of 3 years – to renegotiate some aspects of the Deal, secure a new electoral victory (with the slogan “Get Brexit Done”) and finally get the Deal through Parliament, certifying the exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union on 31st January 2020. During the “transition year”, the UK and EU also negotiated a Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), signed in December 2020. The new relationship saw the end of free movement between the two parties, and the withdrawal of the UK from the Single Market, the Customs Union, and most EU programmes. However, many political and economic issues were left unresolved, opening a long phase of complex disentanglement from decades of regional integration.

In terms of migration and welfare rights, newly arrived EU migrants were going to be subject to the same regulations previously applied to third country nationals. In the aftermath of Brexit, the development of a new migration system ended up coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic and with the substantial halt of all international migration resulting from it (Sumption, 2021). Quite soon, this showed the reliance of the UK labour market on migrant and transnational workers, particularly in sectors such as health and personal care, but also agriculture, retail and logistics. Paradoxically, after years of campaigns against EU free movement, Britain had to rush into organizing emergency charter flights to bring in Romanian workers, notwithstanding the Covid-19 restrictions (D’Angelo, 2020). Meanwhile, opinion polls had started to indicate a reduction in the concerns about immigration and much more positive views about its impact (Runge, 2019). The new consensus seemed to shift from the previous obsessions with limiting the number of arrivals, to one focusing more on their selection for economic benefit. In January 2021, Home Secretary Preti Patel brought forward a new “Point Based Immigration System”. This was for the most part an update of the previous 2008 PBS, with the major difference being the fact that this now applied equally to EU and non-EU nationals. Citizens from the 27 countries of the European Union, including skilled workers, “now require a visa to live or work in the UK, and must pay substantial costs, such as the NHS surcharge of £624 per person per year, which must be paid up-front when applying for the visa” (Walsh, 2021). On the other hand, for non-EU migrants, the new system represented a relative relaxation of the entry criteria, with lower salary and skill thresholds and no cap on numbers (Portes, 2021).

Even before any new measure was put in place, the symbolic effect of the Brexit referendum produced quite a significant impact on migration trends. After a peak ahead of the vote, net migration statistics showed a decline between 2016 and 2018, to then level off, standing around 58,000 in the year ending March 2020 (ONS, 2020). Data from the Office for National Statistics also reveal a reduction in the proportion of EU citizens coming to the UK for work-related reasons and, among those, an increase in those who arrived for a definite job as opposed to looking for work (Lomax, 2019). This trend has been consistent since straight after the referendum, suggesting that – well before the UK actually left the Union – it was the very idea of intra-European mobility that got affected. A significant number of EU nationals were put off by the unwelcoming post-Brexit climate and, later, by the uncertainty of the pandemic and the relative weakness of the pound, which made other European countries more attractive (Bounds, 2021). By summer 2021, British employers reported the worst staff shortages in over 20 years (Partington, 2021a), with a study by a major employment website suggesting the number of EU citizens seeking work in the UK had fallen by 36% since Brexit (Partington, 2021b). Meanwhile, since the mid-2010s, non-EU net migration had gradually increased to some of the highest levels since record began in 1975.

As for those EU nationals who had entered the UK before Brexit, already during the referendum campaign the Westminster government had guaranteed that they would have been able to remain without a substantial change in their rights. For this purpose, in 2019, the Home Office launched the so-called “EU settlement scheme” (EUSS). This allowed EU citizens to apply for a status equivalent to an “indefinite leave to remain” if they could demonstrate their residence prior to 31st December 2020 and having exercised EU Treaty rights for a continuous period of 5 years. Those who entered the UK before that date but did not have 5 years of residence yet, could receive a “pre-settled status” of a temporary nature, pending the acquisition of the requirements for permanency. For all, the deadline for submitting an application was June 30th, 2021. Three months ahead of that (March 31st), 5.3 million people had applied to the scheme (Home Office, 2021), with the main nationalities including Polish (975,180), Romanian (918,270), Italian (500,550), Portuguese (376,440) and Spanish (320,850). Of all the applications reviewed at that point (just under five million), 53% were granted settled status, 44% were granted pre-settled status and 3% had other outcomes, including refusal or withdrawal. As of 31st May – 1 month before the deadline – the number of applications received had reached 5.6 million (Morris & Reuben, 2021).

Since the EUSS scheme was announced, many advocacy organisations expressed concerns that this was going to leave out a substantial number of European citizens, who in many cases remained unaware of the procedures to be followed or whose applications could be rejected for defects of form or inability to produce adequate documentation. For these EU citizens – who had entered the UK freely under EU law, with entitlements nearly identical to UK nationals (Dunin-Wasowicz, 2019) – the risk was to become unlawfully resident overnight. Although the Government claimed applications were processed in about 5 days, data obtained through “freedom of information” requests to the Home Office found thousands of delayed applications, many involving children, and in some cases sitting in the system for over a year (see e.g. Bulman, 2021). As highlighted in an IPPR report, those excluded from the scheme could face a range of “hostile environment” measures, including “barriers to starting a new job, renting a new property, accessing free secondary healthcare, making a benefit claim, opening a bank account, and obtaining a driving licence” (Morris, 2021). This would amount to a dramatic repetition of the “Windrush scandal”. Like before, within the wider British welfare regime, significant decision-making and discretionary powers are left with employers, landlords, doctors and a range of private actors with no knowledge of migration laws and procedures (McKinney, 2021); however, these are actively encouraged to be overzealous in order to avoid facing fines or prosecution. Also in this respect, the British regime was meant to be diffuse but also highly consistent in its bordering endeavours.

This new climate of hostility towards EU “free movers” was also epitomised by the number of EU nationals which were prevented from entering the UK during the Covid-19 pandemic. According to figures published by the Guardian newspaper (Tremlett & O’Carrol, 2021), a total of 3294 people were stopped and sent back between March and April 2021 because they did not have a job in the UK or any other valid reason for entry (this compares with 493 in the first quarter of 2020, when air traffic was 20 times higher). Several citizens of Italy, France, Bulgaria, Greece and other nations were forced to spend the night in the airport or locked-up in detention centres, waiting to be placed on a return flight. The media reports of their stories often echoed those of non-European migrants, sending the clear message that EU-nationals were now as unprivileged as any other migrant.

In parallel to this, it is interesting to notice how, now that EU migrants could not be constructed as much of an internal problem anymore, British public discourses shifted once again against asylum seekers and refugees. A clear example of this was the media hype around the increased – but still pretty limited – sea crossings from the French to the English shores. Even when, on 24th November 2021, 27 asylum seekers drowned in the Channel, the UK Government doubled down on its plans to further militarise its costal borders, whilst many media outlets deployed the narrative of the “illegal migrants” seeking easy access to an overly generous welfare system. Overall, these constant attempts at re-shifting the target of anti-immigration concerns have been interpreted as the “active remaking of colonial modes of rule through the ongoing logics of authorised and unauthorised mobilities” (Davies et al., 2021: 2322), keeping alive the permanent threat of racialised undeserving others: from the Empire to Europe, and back again, with chauvinism as a constant thread.

6 Conclusions: A Very British European Regime?

As examined in the previous sections, Brexit was not a sudden departure but, rather, the “awakening” (Sobolewska & Ford, 2020) of tensions which had been bubbling under the surface of the political mainstream for years. Some of these major trends include ideas of Austerity and one of its key corollaries: welfare chauvinism. As noted by Farnsworth and Irving (2021), Austerity – the systematic cut of public expenditure – is not an economic project but a “political project aimed at transforming the welfare state”. This has been most clearly articulated in the “Anglo-neo-liberal” world and has some of its roots in Thatcherism (Irving, 2021), but it ended up characterized a long era of social policy throughout Europe and well beyond. As pointed out by Guentner et al., (2016, p.: 392), across the EU, after “a neoliberal roll-back, and in an ongoing “dual crisis” of welfare states and national identities […] the very foundations of welfare provisions are put in question”.

Austerity and welfare chauvinism are connected to an ongoing narrative of the deserving and underserving, which changes its target groups over time, but which is also constant in its function: stratifying the access to welfare and services in terms of migration origin, race, gender and class, making welfare and civil rights conditional, exclusionary, and the primary mechanism of internal bordering. Keskinen et al., (2016, p. 322) argued that “it has become more legitimate than ever to claim that welfare benefits should be reserved for certain groups alone, notably those considered ‘natives’ and bearing a self-evident right to belong to the nation, and to develop policies on such bases”. This process needs to be constantly fueled by popular hostility and the sense of an impending crisis (Menjívar et al., 2018). The extent to which these are “real” or “manufactured” – as in the various examples presented in relation to the UK – remains up for discussion and, to an extent, is beside the point.

Mechanisms of stratification are not at all new and, although the way in which they are put in place varies across countries, depending on legislative frameworks and socio-economic differences, they emerge among the defining traits of migration regimes throughout Europe, as exemplified by the work of Morris (2003) on the UK, Germany and Italy. In all these cases – and more – welfare stratification, underpinned by ideas of “deservedness”, rather than universalism, and by pushing the minimum common denominator to the bottom, produce restrictive effects not just for migrants, but for everyone. The basic requirement to implement such stratified systems is not the ability of the state to control entry into the country, but that of regulating access to welfare and public services. In turn, this requires a “migration regime” (Cvajner et al., 2018) characterized by the concerted efforts of a wide range of public and private sector actors under the centralizing direction of the government.

In the UK of the mid-2000s, EU nationals were framed as easily available unskilled workforce; however, their citizenship rights were seen as incompatible with the principles of welfare-chauvinism which had defined decades of British policies across the political spectrum. Thus, it is possible to interpret Brexit not so much as a repudiation of the whole European migration regime, but simply as an attempt to reject the status of these transnational citizens and to place them back into their natural role of “mobile workers” (D’Angelo & Kofman, 2018).

As examined in the previous sections, in spite of the myth of the UK as a reluctant member of the EU, constantly trying to push back and diverge from trends of Europeanisation, another reading is possible. Indeed, the history of the past four decades has been marked by major British influences on the European regime. Ideas of “Third Way” welfare models, the vision of a geographically differentiated “knowledge economy”, and the diffusion of practices of “internal bordering”, all originated – or first reached the mainstream – in Britain, to then become highly influential into policy discourses and processes across the whole of Europe.

As discussed elsewhere (D’Angelo & Gargiulo, 2021), even the idea of regulating welfare access through the recognition – or rejection – of the status of “residence”, in spite of extremely different administrative systems, is something we can find in all corners of Europe, from the United Kingdom (with its “Habitual Residence Test”) to Italy (Gargiulo, 2021). What these different European regimes have in common is the delegation of “bordering” powers to local actors, with significant degrees of discretionality, but all within a coherent framework of chauvinistic “hostility”, which is informed more by ideological than pragmatic consideration (D’Angelo & Gargiulo, 2021).

In all these respects, the UK emerges as an “extreme” case of these general trends (Taylor-Gooby, 2016, p. 717), with Brexit as a means to accelerate in this direction. In fact, Brexit can be seen as the paradoxical result of taking some of the essential features of European regimes to their extreme consequences: the exit from the European Union as EU trend-setting. In the long run, it is unlikely that these dynamics will lead to further departures from the EU; rather, they may push to a further redefinition of the European Migration-Welfare nexus in exclusionary, chauvinistic terms and into a restriction of the actual remit of EU citizenship. Very different outcomes are of course also possible, and with Britain now outside of the European institutions, a new political consensus is all to be built.