Introduction

The arrival of almost one million refugees in Germany from 2015 to 2016 re-sparked the controversy over the redistributive principles of contribution versus solidarity which underpin access to public welfare resources and services in the country. This is not the first time Germany’s resident population has changed. After the launch of the guest-worker programme in the 1960s, the country quickly became one of the most ethnically diverse European countries, leading to migrants now accounting for 25 per cent of its resident population. The research summarised in this chapter took place against the backdrop of Germany’s ever-diversifying population. It contributes to the debate on who should get access to public resources and under what conditions, a challenge which many European countries with extensive welfare states currently face.

Engaging with the central question of belonging, the chapter examines the experiences of intra-EU migrant citizens living in a member state other than their own. They are now one of the largest immigrant groups in Germany yet they are often overlooked. The study challenges the common pretence of EU policy debates that the settlement of EU migrant citizens in a member state other than their own happens without hurdles. Instead, the analysis reveals the types of inequalities in access to claiming welfare benefits and associated services in local job centres that EU migrant citizens may experience when living in Germany. It does so by focusing on social assistance or subsistence-type benefits which are not covered by the EU legal framework of freedom of movement but instead are regulated at member state level.

Considering the EU citizens’ formal status as non-nationals, this inquiry rests on a central tenet of social-psychological theory. The latter has shown that national citizens give privilege to in-group members, as their ‘fellow insiders’, in welfare resource redistribution (Tajfel, 1979). Such in-group preferences raise the question of how outsiders to the welfare state are treated. Insofar as EU migrants are outside the imagined community of solidarity of their host country, they presumably activate politics of belonging when they interact with local welfare bureaucrats.

Part of the novelty of this qualitative study is that it moves away from the (supra-)national policy- and agenda-setting process to the local implementation level.