This article attempts to put carrier sanctions policies in a broad perspective by looking at the immigration context, the rationale behind the policy, the changing character of borders and the regulatory environment of this policy. Carrier sanction legislation can be understood as a remote control instrument, which is supplementary to controls before and at the border and internal controls, whereby the concept of the border as a line between states is abandoned. The second part of the article focuses on the implementation of the carrier sanctions policy in the Netherlands. The Dutch government tries to overcome the principal-agent dilemma arising from involving a third party in enforcement, by installing a system of 'contiguous measures', both negative and positive, to stimulate carriers to perform controls on their passengers' documents. Responsibilities are imposed on carriers but the state, by using 'soft' and 'hard touch' legislation, remains in control.

This article examines the links between residence and social rights in the context of EU citizens’ mobility. It builds on national replies to a questionnaire concerning the implementation and application of Directive 2004/38 at the national level. Our focus is on how the EU28 are implementing the provisions on social assistance for economically inactive EU citizens, including five relevant European Court of Justice (ECJ) judgments in this area (Brey, Dano, Alimanovic, Garcia-Nieto and Commission v UK) and the provisions on permanent residence status. Based on the national replies we argue that asking for social benefits becomes a first step towards being considered by the administration as an unreasonable burden, which leads to the termination of EU residence rights. Our analysis shows that asserting and maintaining residence rights under Articles 7 and 16 of Directive 2004/38 is becoming problematic for certain categories of EU citizens and linked with the more restrictive position taken by some Member States in relation to accessing their national social assistance systems.

In this article, we seek to place the CJEU’s recent case law on social rights for economically inactive EU citizens within the larger political context of the last couple of years that has been characterized by the increased contestation of the type of mobility underpinning EU citizenship. The relationship between EU citizenship and social solidarity – in the form of social rights for mobile EU citizens – has taken centre stage during the Brexit affair. Political debates concerning the free movement of (poor) EU citizens have focused upon the issues of the abuse of free movement rights and welfare tourism, despite a lack of evidence that the two are actually taking place on a large scale within the EU. The now defunct Brexit deal highlights the extension of debates that initially focused on economically inactive EU citizens to EU workers, whose mobility had been considered a positive aspect of EU integration. The scope of social solidarity in the EU is demoted as a result of judicial and political interventions that question the social dimension of EU citizenship and which may have implications for other groups of migrants situated within the EU.

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Political debates concerning the free movement of (poor) EU citizens (mainly from the newer EU Member