Challenging ‘migration exceptionalism’ in EU anti-discrimination law: enhancing equal access to social rights for third-country national workers

Non-EU or ‘third-country national’ workers are increasingly an essential part of the EU workforce. They struggle to obtain full access to social rights on a par with EU citizens, however. This is partly because of the ‘migration exceptionalism’ engrained in EU anti-discrimination law, which largely excludes third-country nationals from protection against discrimination based on nationality and status grounds, such as race and religion. Drawing on EU migration law and recent CJEU jurisprudence, this article demonstrates that in EU anti-discrimination law, similar to international human rights law, migration exceptionalism is not absolute. The article develops legal avenues that make it possible to address cases of discriminatory exclusion of third-country national workers from social rights based on nationality, status grounds and migration status. These avenues help to bridge the protection gap between EU and third-country national workers, and between various categories of the latter.