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This paper explores the constitution of a moral economy of welfare through acts of benefit fraud. The structural conditions of contemporary labour, citizenship, and migration regimes in Europe exclude large shares of workers from access to social citizenship and place them in a position of undeserving trespassers of the social contract. Drawing on the case of Bulgarian Roma engaged in precarious labour and short-term intensive mobility between Bulgaria and the Netherlands, I show how labour conditions in both countries and the structures of the welfare regimes effectively exclude them from access to social citizenship and confine them to the realms of informal work, thus putting them in a position of differential inclusion. The benefit fraud in this context has multiple interpretations—ranging from crime through a survival strategy to a claim to social justice. By mobilizing the idea of the moral economy of welfare, I seek to explain how migrants justify their actions not as transgression, but as a claim to social citizenship and a critique of an unjust social and economic order. In a moral economy of welfare, the migrants see themselves as deserving state support both by virtue of being citizens and of being good workers. Being excluded from proper welfare support is interpreted as a failure of both states. In this context, the fraud is framed in moral terms as an act of citizenship aiming to restore justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whereas the so-called 'citizenship premium' in the labour market has been widely studied, we know little about how naturalisation affects immigrants' lives beyond work and income. Focusing on the Netherlands, this paper analyses the relationship between citizenship acquisition and immigrant residential mobility, in particular the propensity of immigrants to move away from areas with high concentrations of migrants. We draw on register data from Statistics Netherlands (N = 234,912). We argue that possessing Dutch citizenship reduces spatial stratification by diminishing the risk of housing market discrimination, thereby facilitating mobility outside of migrant-concentrated areas. Our findings show that naturalised immigrants are 50% more likely to move out of concentrated neighbourhoods, all else constant. The effect of naturalisation is especially relevant for renting without housing benefits and for home ownership, and for mid-risk immigrants who earn around the median income and hold permanent jobs, whose applications face strong scrutiny from landlords, rental agencies and mortgage lenders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do higher earnings translate into better living conditions for immigrants? While spatial assimilation theory argues that residential patterns reflect economic assimilation, place stratification theory states that immigrants face structural obstacles in their search for better housing, including housing market discrimination. Existing scholarship does not facilitate distinguishing between these contrasting perspectives as analyses typically compare across immigrant groups and natives. By contrast, we focus in this paper on legal status discrimination within the immigrant population in the Netherlands, by testing whether citizenship acquisition provides a positive signal towards housing market actors and moderates the effect of income on residential mobility. We analyse this relation using administrative microdata and using fixed-effects models to control for selection into naturalisation due to unobserved time-invariant heterogeneity. We find that the relation between income gains and immigrants' propensity to live in wealthier neighbourhoods is stronger for naturalised immigrants. These results corroborate the place stratification argument and suggest that naturalisation may help reduce nationality based discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an attempt to foster its citizens' identification with Europe, the European Union has made a great effort to identify what can be called 'common European heritage'. Many heritage initiatives, centred around the idea that heritage should be designated as European by the member states' heritage sectors, have proven counterproductive – instead of reaching their goal to construct a more stable European identity, they served as repositories of national pride and tools in the negotiation of nationalist claims of the member states. Through the empirical case of the EU's own Maastricht Treaty and the peculiar ways it became 'common European heritage' within the Dutch state heritage sector, in this paper we analyze the discursive tactics of national policy makers and the power dynamics between national and EU heritage regimes in the process of designating heritage as European. We demonstrate that even EU states with more constitutional traditions like the Netherlands maintain a powerful role in the construction of heritage as an unchangeable set of traditions and values strictly defined within the national boundaries, lacking the mechanisms to change their state-sanctioned and firmly established ways of defining heritage as 'national' and to legitimatize EU heritage narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]