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A basic function of welfare states is guaranteeing social protection to all citizens. European citizenship aims to create a level playing field for citizens of all Member States. In the process, some categories of citizens tend to be overlooked, or even deprived of previous rights. In this chapter, we focus on young adults as a vulnerable category of citizens. They appear to suffer the most from high unemployment rates, and are encouraged in the Europe 2020 strategy to be mobile to explore opportunities outside their country. However, the rights of young, mobile Europeans are not per se guaranteed if they migrate. A critical analysis of the Youth on the Move program, and recent National Reform Programmes of Member States identifies key discrepancies between EU goals for young adults’ mobility and their social, political, legal and economic position.

This chapter analyses why intra-European migration remains rather low. Traditional migration models based on ‘push–pull’ factors attempt to explain migration from an economic perspective while relying on strict assumptions of individuals’ rationality and perfect information. The chapter integrates ‘push–pull’ factors that stimulate migration with ‘stay–stay away’ factors, which discourage migration. It suggests that migration decision is based on an evaluation of ‘push–pull’ incentives with regard to ‘stay–stay away’ incentives. The results confirm that ‘stay–-stay away’ factors contribute to the explanation of migration intentions. Individuals who score higher on the ’stay–stay away’ index are less likely to envisage migrating at some point in the future. Including both ‘push–pull’ and ‘stay–stay away’ factors in a single model confirms our supposition as to the complementary nature of both groups of predictors and points to the usefulness of a comprehensive ‘push–pull’-’stay–stay away’ framework. Furthermore, our results show that young Europeans are more likely to consider migration for non-economic reasons, while at the same time signalling reluctance to give up their economic security at home.

This chapter focuses on the main social and legal barriers faced by parents, when living, moving or travelling within the European Union. Six European countries considered to be representative of different family law and social policy models are analysed and compared with a non-EU country (Israel). Even though some convergences appear among countries in the progressive legal recognition of different family forms and in the support of work–family balance, the cross-national differences are still significant in both family policies and family law. More traditional countries, such as Croatia and Italy exhibit low family policy support coupled with ‘prohibitionist’ rules in access to parenthood, while the less traditional ones such as Denmark and the Netherlands, show higher family support and wider legal options to become a parent. In Spain and Israel, wider legal options to be recognized as a parent co-exist with comparatively low public support for families. Other developments are observable in Hungary, characterized by relatively high public support for families and narrow legal recognition for family diversity forms.

The chapter explains the tensions and divergent stances that have ensued in the European Parliament (EP) regarding intra-EU mobility and third-country immigration from a gender perspective. The EP-level consensus in relation to migration, mobility, and social rights is to some extent built on silences regarding potential implementation challenges, due to wide Member State differences in welfare and migration regimes, as well as labour market and care arrangement models. Thus, Member State resistance to EU intervention in social policies, and the challenges of portable social security rights, as well as debates on welfare tourism and welfare chauvinism, are left largely untouched. Major obstacles to mobility are identified, but the clash between mobility and social rights is not substantially addressed in EP policies and debates. By emphasizing dynamics of contestation, consensus and silences, we seek to shed light on possibilities and limitations of the role of the FEMM Committee and the EP as policy-makers within the area of freedom of movement and migration.

In this chapter we adopt a comparative cross-national perspective by focussing on the social security and employment rights of migrant care workers in three welfare states – the UK, Israel and Italy. We look at how the transnational context, the national institutional context (the long-term care [LTC] system including its ‘logic of care’, migration policies, the social security system) and migrants’ individual factors interact in shaping the employment and migration status of migrant care workers and subsequently their employment and social security rights. The analysis suggests that a shared ‘logic of care’ is the common institutional denominator that may explain the precariousness of migrant care work that was found in all the countries studied. Additionally, due to the temporary nature of the work and to the high degree of informal working regulations, migrant workers tend to be not recognized as ‘full citizens’ in the hosting countries, and thus have limited access to citizen rights, including working rights.

This chapter explores national attitudes towards civil and social rights across diverse family forms in Europe and the role of European Union in harmonizing these rights across Member States. It uses cross-national data from a pilot study among students in Denmark, Spain, Croatia, Italy and the Netherlands to investigate cross-country differences in these attitudes. It concludes that respondents from more traditional countries tend to privilege the rights of married heterosexual couples over other family forms than respondents in non-traditional countries. In more traditional countries, respondents were less likely to agree that equality on civil rights is necessary. In all countries, advocating a common legal framework across Europe regarding parenthood rights appears to be stronger, and in the field of partnership rights when it concerns civil unions rather than marriages, with no differences across family types. In the field of social rights, the support for a common legal framework across Europe is weaker in less traditional countries.

This chapter addresses the divergence and convergence of the framings of gender equality in nationalist and nativist discourses in the 2014 EP elections. It compares how representatives of populist radical-right (PRR) parties in Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain, frame gender equality and family issues in relation to migration and mobility in their electoral campaigns for the EP and during the first months of the 2014–18 parliamentary cycle. Gender and family issues are part of the programmes, campaigns and statements of the populist radical right, less prominently in the Nordic countries but quite centrally in the East, Central and Southern European countries as well as Germany. The analysis shows how rather than using similar gender and family frames, gender and family issues are instrumentalized to serve various exclusive forms of nationalism, anti-colonialist claims, or nationalist demographic sustainability arguments.