This study examined immigrants’ support for social spending. We tested the dominant self‐interest hypothesis for a number of immigrant groups in the Netherlands with highly varying socio‐economic positions. We additionally examined the effect of immigrants’ group interest by testing the relevance of in‐group immigrant benefit participation rates and their effect on support for social spending. In this article, we discuss how immigrants’ sense of belonging to a group affects the association between immigrants’ self‐ and group interests in welfare and their support for social spending. We found that self‐interest has explanatory relevance, but that this is strongly correlated with level of income. Results showed weak support for the effect of group interest. Instead of the expected moderation effects of sense of belonging on the self‐ and group‐interest explanations of support for social spending, the results showed a direct effect of sense of belonging on support for social spending.

This study contributes to the structural migrants' integration literature with its focus on a wider understanding of welfarebased incomes among immigrants in the Netherlands. We examined whether immigrants' reliance on either unemployment benefits, occupational disabilities benefits, or social assistance could be explained through human-capital and social-capital determinants. We found that this foremostly applies to social assistance-based incomes, presenting the relevance of disentangling various welfare schemes. We additionally proposed that more capital increases immigrants' knowledge about the welfare schemes' bureaucratic procedures and that under the condition of lacking employment more capital leads to higher chances for a welfare-based income, but we found little support for this explanation.

Public healthcare is still one of the main pillars of European welfare states, despite the increasing number of migrants, we know little about migrants’ attitudes toward healthcare. We used recent data from the MIFARE survey and compared natives with a variety of nine migrant groups living in Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, focusing on migrants’ preferred level of governmental involvement and their satisfaction with public healthcare. We found that, compared to natives, migrants held the government less responsible for providing healthcare while expressing a higher level of satisfaction. Whereas health differences among migrants and natives did not explain this ethnic gap, we found that these ethnic gaps are moderated by socialization processes and knowledge of healthcare rights.

No abstract

Immigrants’ opinions on welfare spending are often ignored, but an examination of these perspectives provides further insights into the formation of welfare attitudes. We developed a framework proposing that support for welfare spending is not only driven by self-interest and group-interest, but also by the preferences and perceptions of immigrants regarding their group’s access to welfare. We discuss how these two aspects affect immigrants’ support for spending on unemployment benefits and social assistance in the Netherlands. Immigrants were found to be more supportive of spending on welfare to which they perceived they had greater access, particularly when they preferred a more generous access for their group. Their support for welfare spending was weaker if they preferred less generous access.