peer reviewed ; Although Member states have increasingly relied on welfare policies to control intra-EU migration in the last decade, they often grant additional social rights to EU citizens who do not comply with residency requirements set by EU law, revealing a gap between declared restrictive aims and actual inclusive measures. Based on document analysis and semi-structured interviews in Belgium, this article analyses the interests and logics of the plurality of institutional and civil society actors on the welfare-EU migration nexus, suggesting that policy inconsistency resulted from the struggle of these – conflictive – logics. In doing so, the paper also reveals how the category of ‘illegal EU migrants’ has been institutionally produced ‘from below’, with healthcare providers, welfare bureaucracies and pro-immigrant organisations – rather than ‘the State’ – taking the lead in that process.