The increasing mobility of people across the world has been accompanied by increasing attempts to control the borders of nation states, with a major expansion of national and supranational systems in the governance of migration since the post-war period (Cornelius et al, 2004; Betts, 2011). Those systems, notwithstanding their limits, have facilitated migration for some, while severely restricting migration for others (Cornelius et al, 2004). At the same time, attempts to control migration have facilitated access to rights within the territory of nation states for some, including rights to work and to welfare, and to permanent legal residence, while restricting access for others. Those restrictions are often framed in policy debates in terms of need for specific types of migrant labour – to select migrants who are seen as contributing to national economies (Ruhs and Anderson, 2010). But they are also framed in terms of resources – to protect welfare states from being ‘burdened’ by migrants (Bommes and Geddes, 2000). However, controlling the mobility of people is not simply about the inclusion or exclusion of migrants relative to citizens. Citizenship can exclude ‘from within’ as well as ‘from without’ (Lister, 2003) in terms of the assumptions underpinning policies in relation to work and welfare, and the conditions for inclusion.

Immigration and welfare reforms in the UK have been underpinned by a market model of citizenship that assumes both citizens and migrants should be increasingly self-sufficient workers. Welfare reforms have reinforced citizens’ reliance on the market through both cuts to incomerelated benefits and increasingly restrictive work-related conditions for claiming those benefits, with the withdrawal of benefits as a penalty for non-compliance (Dwyer and Wright, 2014). At the same time, immigration reforms have restricted migrant workers’ access to rights of residence in the UK, and to income-related benefits on the basis of residence, by requiring a certain level of earnings as a condition of access to those rights. Those policies have implications not only for differentiation in access to social rights between citizens and migrants and within those groups. They also have implications for the gendered exclusion of women as citizens and migrants from access to rights and resources.