Migration Policy and Welfare Chauvinism in the United Kingdom: European Divergence or Trend-Setting?

Growing hostility towards large-scale immigration following the EU enlargement (2004) and, later, the increase in South-North flows due to the global financial crisis (2008), played a major role in the Brexit referendum of 2016. This marked the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union and from its mechanisms of “free movement”. Such hostility was not framed simply in terms of xenophobia but, rather, as “welfare chauvinism”. This chapter critically examines the last few decades of policy and political debates around intra-European migration in the United Kingdom, the key trends that have led to the (not so) unpredictable Brexit referendum, and the scenarios which have been set in motion with the UK-EU Agreement of 2020. In spite of the strong sense of British exceptionalism which has informed UK discussions, some of the fundamentals underpinning this process have much in common with what we are witnessing elsewhere in Europe, with the stratification of (welfare) rights for different categories of migrants being used as a pragmatic – if not cynical – mechanism to regulate entry and settlement. In fact, what at political and institutional level appears yet as the major rapture within the European framework, may end up revealing itself as part of a wider trend among both Northern and Southern European regimes: the restrictionist reconfiguration of the welfare-migration nexus. This race to the welfare bottom is not only affecting newly arrived migrants, but eroding the rights of the wider population.