ABSTRACT
West European welfare states have implemented more restrictive immigration policies towards citizens from outside the European Union (EU). International migration is a result of economic, political and cultural internationalization. It poses challenges to welfare states that have developed as nation states. 'Citizenship' is a social status conferring a set of rights and obligations upon individuals in a national welfare state. 'Nationalism' provides the basic legitimation for the internal and external exclusiveness of citizenship in modern national welfare states. While immigrants may seek to benefit, and usually do at least partly so, from individual rights of social citizenship, they may be excluded from this second meaning of citizenship. Social citizenship has universal characteristics in that inclusion into social rights in most Western welfare states are based upon mere presence, participation into labour markets and permanent residence. The recognition of social rights and the freedom of movement for workers and their dependents in the EU needs a crucial prerequisite.
