This paper analyses how retirement migrants' mobility is enabled, impeded, and sometimes enforced by national and European Union migration and welfare rules and the ways in which retirement migrants deal with these 'legal gates' in practice. Legal gates are conceptualised as the rules operating at different local, national, and supranational levels, which regulate human mobility between one jurisdiction and another. Drawing on the new mobilities paradigm, the paper shows how retirement migrants construct and negotiate their mobility and residence arrangements within the confines of the different welfare systems. Focusing on Dutch and Spanish retirement migrants who spent their working life in the Netherlands and move or return (permanently or temporarily) to Spain after retirement, this paper shows on the one hand the power of the state to influence retirement migrants' mobility and on the other hand it shows how inequalities between retirement migrants' socio-economic status influences their capacity to be mobile.

This article focuses on Dutch retirement migrants who move to Spain and Turkey after retirement. Retirement migrants move at a stage in their life cycle which can be associated with health deterioration. The need to seek access to healthcare provisions may therefore be important in the migratory experience of retirement migrants. This article provides an analysis at three different and interrelated levels by drawing on an analytical framework of Faist, Bilecen, Barglowski and Sienkiewicz. The article discusses the interrelationship between: (1) European, national, and private rules and regulations on health care which determine retirement migrants' access to healthcare provisions in the home and host state; (2) retirement migrants' social networks as a space where collective meaning is given to these rules and regulations and where retirement migrants create preferences for healthcare provisions; and (3) retirement migrants' strategies to access their preferred set of healthcare provisions in the home and host state. It will be argued that retirement migrants may navigate their way through the healthcare systems and may change their mobility or residence pattern in order to be seen as a resident in the Netherlands or Spain/Turkey in order to access their preferred set of healthcare provisions.

This paper examines how gender plays a role in the decision-making processes of older migrants on where to live after retirement. It is based on 20 in-depth interviews with Spanish-born migrants and 56 in-depth interviews with Turkish-born migrants who spent their working lives in the Netherlands and returned to their country of origin or started moving back and forth between both countries after retirement. Existing studies on return migration have shown that women are often more reluctant than men to settle back in their country of origin, yet these studies also acknowledge that more in-depth research should be conducted on the role of gender in migrants' decision-making on return migration. In this paper, we examine, firstly, why our female respondents were often more reluctant to return and how this influenced the decision-making processes of couples or families. Secondly, we analyse how the different citizenship statuses of the respondents (Dutch, Spanish, Turkish and/or European) influenced their decision-making and how citizenship interacted with gender differences.

The European institutions picture EU citizens as important actors in the process of transforming EU citizenship into a "tangible reality". By knowing and practising EU citizenship rights, EU citizens are supposed to give meaning and depth to the otherwise hollow concept of EU citizenship. What EU citizenship means for mobile citizens themselves and how EU citizens practice and evaluate their rights ("lived citizenship") is generally not a central theme in reports and studies on EU citizenship. In this article the value of EU citizenship will be discussed by applying a qualitative research approach and by focusing on retired EU citizens' perspectives and practice of, in particular, free movement. This article applies a comparative approach and includes EU citizens who move or return from the Netherlands to Spain or Turkey after retirement. Four groups of EU citizens move between these countries: Dutch nationals who move to Spain, Spanish nationals who return to Spain, Dutch nationals who move to Turkey and Turkish dual-nationals who return to Turkey after retirement. This article shows that migratory background, country of origin, country of retirement and the way in which EU citizenship is acquired determine retirement migrants' perspectives and practice of EU citizenship.

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