Granting immigrants access to social benefits? How self-interest influences support for welfare state restrictiveness

Abstract

In the context of large-scale migration within and into Europe, the question of whether and under which conditions immigrants should be granted access to social benefits in the country of destination is of high political relevance. A large body of research has studied natives' attitudes towards giving immigrants access to the welfare state, while research on attitudes of immigrants themselves is scarce. Focusing on the impact of self-interest, we compare immigrants and native citizens in their attitudes towards granting immigrants access to the welfare state. We identify three mechanisms through which self-interest can influence these attitudes: immigrant origin, socioeconomic status and-for first-generation immigrants only-incorporation into the host society. We test our expectations using cross-national data from the European Social Survey round 2008. The findings suggest that self-interest is indeed one of the factors that motivate attitudes towards welfare state restrictiveness among natives and immigrants, but also point at relevant exceptions to this pattern.

Ethnic minorities’ support for redistribution: The role of national and ethnic identity

“…Compared with the topic of redistribution, it is more likely that national identities have been mobilized in political debates on the boundaries of welfare state arrangements, migrants’ access to social rights (Wright and Reeskens, 2013), and the pressures of supra-national organizations like the European Union on the national welfare state (Hooghe and Marks, 2005). Based on previous research (Degen et al, 2018; Theiss-Morse, 2009; Wright and Reeskens, 2013), it would seem questionable that solidarity based on national identity is highly inclusive towards new immigrants who are seeking access to the welfare state. A natural progression of the current study would be to investigate the effect of ethnic minorities’ multiple social identities on their views about the boundaries of the national welfare state.…”

“…The existing quantitative studies often focus on how migrants’ opinions differ with those of native citizens and test whether there is evidence for the assimilation of their opinions (Reeskens and an Oorschot, 2015; Schmidt-Catran and Careja, 2017). With regard to the determinants of the attitudes, they tend to investigate the effect of traditional predictors, like unemployment experience, income, level of education, work status and left–right orientation (Dancygier and Saunders, 2006; Degen et al, 2018; Lubbers et al, 2018; Reeskens and an Oorschot, 2015). Although of certain relevance, these predictors are able to explain only a limited amount of the variation.…”

COVID-19, Nation-States and Fragile Transnationalism

“…4. Service/support scarcity: Before the pandemic, many non-citizen migrant groups had already often been denied full access to social security and public services in their host societies, for example in certain parts of Europe (Degen et al, 2019).…”

The national boundaries of solidarity: a survey experiment on solidarity with unemployed people in the European Union

“…While highly relevant and informative for our study, this strand of research differs in two important ways from our goals. First, welfare and labour market chauvinism relate to exclusion of immigrants from national institutions (Degen et al , 2018), while this paper analyses public support for policies targeting foreigners living in other countries. It is even plausible that some Europeans, who do not want the benefits of their national welfare state to be extended to immigrants, would however be favourable of helping unemployed people abroad, as this might prevent their migration (similar arguments are sometimes made with respect to development aid).…”