This chapter adopts a two-stage analysis of legal resilience against far-reaching restrictions of migrants’ rights. It first investigates the resilience of the Belgian constitutional system against potential hostile take-over by right-wing populists. It is concluded that the constitutional framework provides relatively robust protection against democratic decay, as a result of which the separation of powers remains intact. At the same time, most constitutional safeguards that prevent a hypothetical slide towards authoritarianism in Belgium only provide weak constraints against the very real and systematic undermining of migrants’ rights. Therefore, during the second stage of the analysis an assessment is made of the room for legal resilience in Belgium. Unlike in Poland and Hungary, it is shown, civil society actors have been able – and often forced – to resort to the independent courts in a bid to safeguard migrants’ rights in Belgium. In practice, the chapter concludes, this has led to mixed results, in that courts have only safeguarded minimal respect for migrants’ rights rather than adopting a maximalist interpretation. The room for legal resilience against restrictive migration laws and policies in Belgium thus remains more limited than could be expected.

The Introduction contextualizes the volume’s objectives, introduces its research questions and defines basic terms. A starting point is the finding in the literature that migration is ’merely’ one of several contributing factors to democratic decay, in the sense that (authoritarian) populists have seized on the ‘migration crisis’ to further undermine constitutional democracy. Yet, in our estimation the relationship between the three forces that reside at the core of this volume – populism, democratic decay and migration – is more multifaceted and complex. After engaging with this relationship, the Introduction examines avenues for legal resilience against (authoritarian) populism. By drawing inspiration from the scholarship on environmental law, a definition of legal resilience is proposed, on the basis of which a two-stage analysis is developed to evaluate the possibilities and limitations of legal resilience against (overly) restrictive migration laws and policy. In a first stage, it should be determined how resilient the legal system itself has been in the face of populist onslaught. In the second stage, once we know how resilient the legal system as a whole has proven to be, we can identify the extent to which it provides for legal resilience against restrictive migration laws and policies.