The welfare aspects of intra-European migration remain an important and controversial topic of academic and political debates. These discussions touch upon the classical ‘welfare magnet’ or ‘welfare tourism’ hypothesis. Transcending the politicised concept of ‘benefit tourism’, our paper examines how welfare-state considerations in relation to migration decisions vary across the life course. Relying on micro-level qualitative research focusing on Spanish intra-EU movers, the paper probes deeper into how individuals perceive welfare systems, analysing the subtle and nuanced meanings of different aspects of the welfare for their migration decisions. We focus more specifically on welfare provisions in terms of health care, compulsory education, child support and other care responsibilities, unemployment and pensions and retirement. Our research indicates that, in studies on the migration–welfare nexus, it is necessary to move beyond the current narrow focus on the welfare magnet hypothesis and to examine how diverse welfare arrangements continuously and dynamically set the context for migration decisions at various stages of an individual’s life. The results of our research show how features of the Spanish welfare system, in comparison to those of potential destination countries, might act as both a trigger and/or a barrier to migration. As such, we get a ‘thicker description’ of the role which welfare might play in shaping individuals’ eventual migratory aspirations and decisions.

In this article, I am trying to enquire briefly into a certain issue that was, in a way, the hallmark of Andrzej Walicki’s worldview. The issue concerns his interpretation of freedom, and above all, his preference for negative freedom („freedom from”), which epitomized liberalism, against the concept of positive freedom („freedom to”), which for Walicki was a systemic and pernicious encumbrance in Marxism. However, in his later works, Walicki nuanced his opinions and paid more attention to the weaknesses of liberalism arising from its inability to absorb some aspects of positive freedom associated with contemporary ideas inspired by Marxism.

Italy is one of the most important destination countries for Romanians. At the same time, the Italian care sector relies mainly on migrant labour, most of whom are Romanian women. Historically, Italy is considered one of the landmark countries for the southern or Mediterranean welfare state, characterised by its fragmented labour market, underdeveloped social protection system, informal economy and unpaid care work, usually done by the women in the family. Italy has one of the highest rates in Europe of both the elderly population and life expectancy at birth. In the last 20 years, the care work was gradually redistributed to migrant care workers, most of them women from former socialist countries, who often live in the household where they work. Migration from Eastern Europe, particularly Romania, has been facilitated, on the one hand, by rising unemployment and low-paid job opportunities in migrants’ countries of origin in the context of the deindustrialisation of state industry and, on the other, by the Italian elderly public-support system which is based on cash benefits granted to the family which can be redistributed to employ migrant care workers. In this paper we analyse three specific types of care work migration from Romania to Italy and the main challenges which they face, taking into account the specifics of the work and the type of migration chosen. The methodology is qualitative, based on 20 semi-structured online interviews with Romanian care workers and two interviews with stakeholders.

When discussing justice, John Rawls focuses on smooth functioning, impartiality and social acceptability of the system of political obligations. His theory of justice is forged as a system of liberal democracy combined with constitutionally established principles of welfare state. Although Rawls distinguishes between political and moral norms, he believes that in a welfare constitutional state a reliable method of negotiating between demands of all citizens is accessible by adoption of a social contract. A social contract presupposes a nearly unanimous view on the character of a good political system. This is a case of soft naturalization. The author distinguishes it from hard naturalization that is not applicable to normative political theories.