Immigration and the modern welfare state: The case of USA and Germany

Abstract

Increasing migration has led to extensive discussion of the definition of membership within a nation-state. This article presents a comparison of the inclusion of migrants into welfare programmes in the USA and in Germany. In the first part of the article a brief overview is provided of immigration categories in both countries in order to demonstrate the relevance of these administrative regulations for the opportunities of individual migrants to participate in the welfare system. In the second part we elaborate in more detail on how welfare programmes have developed as basic mechanisms to include or exclude migrants. Our findings illustrate an increasing differentiation of membership statuses parallel to the expansion of modern welfare systems. In both the USA and Germany, the territorial principle and participation in the labour market are of prime importance to the access to social rights. In both cases all migrants may profit from contributory programmes.

Migrants and social policy: shifting research agendas

“…These rather optimistic predictions were followed by studies revealing how a stratification of social rights -between citizens and migrants more broadly -took place during the 1990s and 2000s, despite the weakening of the citizenship-based model (Wenzel & Bös, 1997;Morris, 2002;Andersen, 2007;Breidahl, 2017). These studies provided a new but rather scattered picture of the status of social rights of migrants in Western democracies as they focused on a range of different programmes, including housing policies, labour market policies, education, medical care, etc.…”

Social Policy in Changing European Societies

“…These rather optimistic predictions were followed by studies revealing how a stratification of social rights -between citizens and migrants more broadly -took place during the 1990s and 2000s, despite the weakening of the citizenship-based model (Wenzel & Bös, 1997;Morris, 2002;Andersen, 2007;Breidahl, 2017). These studies provided a new but rather scattered picture of the status of social rights of migrants in Western democracies as they focused on a range of different programmes, including housing policies, labour market policies, education, medical care, etc.…”

Social protection for mobile populations? A global perspective on immigrant social rights

“…A number of articles explicitly focus on one or several benefit types, such as social assistance (e.g., Harris and Römer 2022) employment related benefits (Gschwind 2021; Guiraudon 2002), or family and employment related benefits (Boucher 2014; Eugster 2018; Naldini, Adamson, and Hamilton 2022). A smaller number of studies includes a larger array of benefits (Guiraudon 2002; Kim 2021; Wenzel and Bös 1997). Noteworthy is especially Koning (2022) who includes seven different benefit types.…”