The Swedish welfare state finds itself in the middle of two major upheavals: The impact of technology and immigration. Having taken in more refugees per capita than most other countries, the pillars of the welfare state are being shaken. Digital technologies are set to strengthen already existing trends towards job and wage polarization. This book explores how these trends are more pronounced due to the rigidity of the labor market and the comprehensiveness of tax-financed welfare services.

Is large-scale immigration to Europe incompatible with the continent's generous and encompassing welfare states? Are Europeans willing to share welfare benefits with ethnically different and often less well-off immigrants? Or do they regard the newcomers as undeserving and their claim for welfare rights as unjustified? These questions are at the heart of what has to become known as the 'New Progressive Dilemma' debate — and the predominant answers given to them are rather pessimistic. Pointing to the experiences of the US, where a multi-racial society in combination with a longstanding history of immigration encounters very limited welfare provision, many Europeans fear that the continent's new immigrant-based heterogeneity may push it toward more American levels of redistribution. But are the conflictual US experiences really resembled in the European context? Immigration and Welfare State Retrenchment addresses this question by connecting the New Progressive Dilemma debate with comparative welfare state and party research in order to analyse the role ethnic diversity plays for welfare reforms in the US and Europe. Whereas the combination of racial patterns and party politics had and still has serious consequences for the US welfare system, the general message of the book is that these are not resembled in the Western European context. While many Europeans are very critical of immigration and willing to ban immigrants from welfare benefits, both the institutional design of European welfare programs and the economically divided anti-immigrant movement prevent immigration concerns from translating into actual retrenchment in the core areas of welfare.

Three Worlds of Relief examines the role of race and immigration in the development of the American social welfare system by comparing how blacks, Mexicans, and European immigrants were treated by welfare policies during the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Taking readers from the turn of the twentieth century to the dark days of the Depression, Cybelle Fox finds that, despite rampant nativism, European immigrants received generous access to social welfare programs. The communities in which they lived invested heavily in relief. Social workers protected them from snooping immigration agents, and ensured that noncitizenship and illegal status did not prevent them from receiving the assistance they needed. But that same helping hand was not extended to Mexicans and blacks. Fox reveals, for example, how blacks were relegated to racist and degrading public assistance programs, while Mexicans who asked for assistance were deported with the help of the very social workers they turned to for aid. Drawing on a wealth of archival evidence, Fox paints a riveting portrait of how race, labor, and politics combined to create three starkly different worlds of relief. She debunks the myth that white America's immigrant ancestors pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, unlike immigrants and minorities today. Three Worlds of Relief challenges us to reconsider not only the historical record but also the implications of our past on contemporary debates about race, immigration, and the American welfare state.

Migration, Family and the Welfare State explores understandings and practices of integration in the Scandinavian welfare societies of Denmark, Norway and Sweden through a comprehensive range of detailed ethnographic studies. Chapters examine discourses, policies and programs of integration in the three receiving societies, studying how these are experienced by migrant and refugee families as they seek to realize the hopes and ambitions for a better life that led them to leave their country of origin. The three Scandinavian countries have had parallel histories as welfare societies receiving increasing numbers of migrants and refugees after World War II, and yet they have reacted in dissimilar ways to the presence of foreigners, with Denmark developing tough immigration policies and nationalist integration requirements, Sweden asserting itself as a relatively open country with an official multicultural policy, and Norway taking a middle position. The book analyses the impact of these differences and similarities on immigrants, refugees and their descendants across three intersecting themes: integration as a welfare state project; integration as political discourse and practice; and integration as immigrants’ and refugees’ quest for improvement and belonging. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.

This open access book explores the role of family, public, market and third sector welfare provision for individual and households’ decisions regarding geographical mobility. It challenges the state-centred approach in research on welfare and migration by emphasising migrants’ own reflections and experiences. It asks whether and in which ways different welfare concerns are part of migrants’ decisions regarding (or aspirations for) mobility. Employing a transnational and a translocal perspective, the book addresses different forms of geographical mobility, such as immigration, emigration, and re-migration, circular and return migration. By bringing in empirical findings from across a variety of Western and non-Western contexts, the book challenges the Eurocentric focus in current debates and contributes to a more nuanced and more integrated global account of the welfare-migration nexus.

Seminar paper from the year 2006 in the subject Politics - Region: Western Europe, grade: 1,0, University of Münster (Politikwissenschaft - European Studies), course: European Social Policies, language: English, abstract: Armed conflict, economic despair, and systematic violations of human rights have produced unprecedented challenges to today’s international system. It is thus; the post-Cold War era has become witness to significant alterations in global politics that has subsequently generated acute increases in the number of worldwide migrants. Consequently, it is the relationship staggered between immigration and welfare that continues to become an increasingly salient European affair. Immigration continues to remain a contentious issue spawning vigorous debates intensely focused on welfare and social rights. Areimmigrants likely to make positive contributions to welfare states? Or are immigrants rather liable to be a threat, posingfinancial, social and political burdens, and an overall risk to the survival of these welfare states? Underpinning these ubiquitousquestions has been a realignment of debates about the needs and resources of European welfare states, with the renewed interest in immigration as a means of offsetting skills and labour market shortages, while countering the effects of a demographicallyaging European population.1Immigration additionally has beenviewed as a means in achieving the European Union’s ambitious Lisbon targets, in that Europe “would become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world, capable of sustainable economic growth with more and better jobs and greater social cohesion”.2Yet as with most social issues, the simple term ‘immigration’ fails to do justice to the wide range of issues that this policy area entails. In fact, there is much to be said about the composition of immigrants, and it would be a huge oversight to classify immigration as though it were homogenous. An acute distinction must be drawn between ‘desired’ and ‘undesired’ forms of immigration, in the ways in which debates about needs and resources have been recast in Europe. Indeed, it seems that through this differentiation, European welfare states have pursued a janus-headed approach to immigration, in that European welfare states continue to open their doors, to highly-skilled immigrants, deemed as positive, but on the otherhand have continued to vigorously close their doors, particularly to asylum immigrants, which have become increasingly unwanted and the source of restrictive polices.

Analysing two major surveys of 14 different migrant groups connected to Danish register data, this insightful book explores what migrants think of the welfare state. It investigates the question of whether migrants assimilate to the ideas of extensive state intervention in markets and families or if they retain the attitudes and values that are prevalent in their countries of origin.