‘Those people don’t realise that it just works the same way’ : Similarity in home country and host country welfare systems and its impact on knowledge gaps of students abroad

Sammanfattning

Legislation on social security portability has made within-EU migration significantly less complex. This said, existing research on the practical experiences of migrants points at the continued presence of challenges when moving between different welfare systems, creating space for intermediary actors to offer support. A highly mobile group of EU citizens so far neglected in this strand of research is students. This is problematic, as students are often relatively dependent on state support. This thesis aims to fill this gap. It does so on the premise that migrants possess knowledge gaps about their host country systems. These are informed by their knowledge of the home country welfare system in which they have been socialised. Semi-structured interviews are conducted with (former) students moving from the Netherlands to Sweden and Germany, respectively, to test the presence and impact of these knowledge gaps. Two forms of welfare are examined for each country dyad: student finance, where the Dutch and Swedish systems show similarity, and health care, where the Dutch and German systems show similarity. Based on interviews with eleven individuals, it is found that knowledge gaps about student finance are more prevalent in Germany than in Sweden, in line with expectations. Unexpectedly, knowledge gaps are present to a similar extent in both Germany and Sweden when health care is concerned, which could be due to the comprehensible nature of the universal Swedish system. Importantly, interviewees also possessed knowledge gaps about home country systems, which led to serious adverse consequences in three cases.