The past 15 years have seen a growing number of studies investigating how migrants’ legal status affects their employment. Typically, this literature tends to view legal restrictions, conditions and opportunities as parts of a wider political opportunity structure circumscribing migrants’ agency and their ability to secure gainful employment. But the reverse question – the effects of employment on residential legality – has hardly been broached.This thematic cluster focuses on the role of employment for the legal status of non-nationals in Europe and the many ways in which work has come to determine migrant citizenship. We refer to citizenship in a broad sense, covering access to various types of formal legal status as well as normative struggles over what constitutes ‘good citizenship’ that can affect migrants’ likelihood to obtain, maintain, renew, improve, or lose their legal status.