186 M. Ferrera burdens of ‘hospitality’.9 Empirical studies demonstrate that intra-EU mobility is not driven by benefit tourism and that, in the aggregate, it tends to benefit the receiving member states. But at the disaggregate level (this or that territorial area, this or that economic sector, this or that policy field) the negative economic and social externalities produced by the mobiles may be greater than the positive ones. The influx of citizens from other EU member states may in fact decrease – locally and contingently – the availability of scarce resources such as jobs, hospital beds, emergency care, social housing, school places and so on.10 While it may be true that national or local governments have not made the necessary public investments in this policy areas11, the fact remains that mobility has increased the overall problem pressure and originated novel unprecedented needs and policy challenges (e.g. in terms of educational assistance, spatial congestion and segregation, and so on). The social impact of mobility has been significant and it has been perceived as such by a great number of ordinary citizens, who ‘blame Brussels’ because mobility rules do come from Brussels. Contrary to what happens at the domestic level, the social component of EU citizenship rests on regulation, not on allocation (i.e. material provisions directly funded through tax extractions on the side of the conferring authority). The obstacles to expand the EU budget and powers were (and still are) huge; when it was introduced – in the early 1970s – social security coordination, instead of social supranationalisation, was probably the only feasible solution. But this strategy has caused serious political asymmetries: as a matter of fact, it has empowered a relatively small constituency of mobile citizens, at the (perceived) expenses of large majorities of non-mobile natives.12 In the medium and large EU countries, more than half of the natives have always lived in the region where they were born and hardly expect to exercise themselves the rights of free movement. On average, large majorities of nationals have never visited another EU country, watched TV or read a book in another language, used the internet to purchase goods from abroad. It is not surprising that many of these people perceive the 9 10 11 12 Ferrera, M. (2017), The contentious politics of hospitality. Intra-Eu mobility and social rights. European Law Journal, published online on 25 May 2017. See European Commission (2014), Evaluation of the impact of the free movement of EU citizens at local level. Final Report. Brussels, January 2014. As argued, among others, by the contributions in Part II of this book. The capacity of free movement rights and actual transnational mobility to nurture a sense of identification with the EU seems to be, paradoxically, rather limited. See Damay, L. & H. Mercenier (2016), ‘Free Movement and EU Citizenship: a virtuous circle?’ Journal of European Public Policy 23 (8): 1139–1157.