‘Migrants’, ‘Mobile Citizens’ and the Borders of Exclusion in the European Union Martin Ruhs In his opening contribution to this debate about the future of free movement in the European Union, Floris de Witte concludes that ‘free movement must be celebrated and defended as the core of EU citizenship, as a right that is available for all 500 million EU citizens, and as an idea that benefits all those citizens – whether they make use of it or not.’ [emphasis mine] One of the key reasons de Witte provides for his defence of free movement is that ‘it makes us sensitive to practices of exclusion’. He argues that ‘the right to free movement and non-discrimination attached to EU citizenship can be understood to correct instances of injustice and promote the inclusion of outsiders: it makes national distributive systems sensitive to the need to incorporate EU migrants who contribute to the host state in an economic and social way.’ De Witte is right that free movement serves the important goal of promoting the inclusion of EU migrants (the ‘outsiders’ in de Witte’s analysis) in the economies and societies of EU member states. This is clearly an important achievement of free movement. However, what about the inclusion and exclusion of the much larger group of ‘outsiders’, namely, people from outside the European Union? If part of our evaluation of free movement is based on its effects on the exclusion of outsiders –and I agree that this should be a fundamental concern – don’t we need to consider all outsiders, not just those from within the EU? My main critique of de Witte’s discussion is that it considers free movement in complete isolation of EU countries’ immigration policies and exclusionary practises toward non-EU nationals. This focus on free movement without consideration of wider immigration policies is striking, especially in the context of many EU member states’ highly restrictive policies towards Parts of this chapter appear in Ruhs, M. (2017), ‘Making linkages in migration research: “Migrants” and “mobile citizens” in the European Union’, in F. Altenburg et al. (eds.), Migration und Globalisierung in Zeiten des Umbruchs. Festschrift für Gudrun Biffl [Migration and Globalisation in Times of Change. Festschrift for Gudrun Biffl], 37–46. Krems: Edition Donau-Universität Krems. © The Author(s) 2019 R. Bauböck (ed.), Debating European Citizenship, IMISCOE Research Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89905-3_32 163