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.

This volume analyses the effects of immigration on welfare spending by focusing on the political alignment of voters and the corresponding welfare policies of governments.

This book situates ethnic heterogeneity in the larger discussion of the welfare state and its redistributive outcomes, poverty and inequality. By using comprehensive, longitudinal data covering 1980 to 2010 from 17 high income countries, this analysis helps achieve a major milestone in comparative welfare state research both conceptually and methodologically. Conceptually, it elevates the relevance of growing ethnic heterogeneity in thinking about how politics and economics of the welfare state operate, collectively impacting the magnitudes of poverty and inequality. Methodologically, the analysis conducted in this book provides broader empirical tests for the many propositions and discourses found in the literature based largely on anecdotal evidence, case studies, and unjustifiably limited quantitative data. The innovative oeprationalization of the multidimensional character of both welfare state policies and ethnic heterogeneity help broaden the analytical frameworks of comparative welfare state research. The outcome is a major advance in the way we understand the causes and redistributive consequences of the welfare state, in which ethno-racial, religious, and especially immigration heterogeneity can play a crucial role. A thorough and insightful analysis presented in this book helps students, researchers, and policymakers better understand the ethnic heterogeneity connections of the welfare state and redistribution, together with a comparative perspective of the changing faces of ethnic heterogeneity, welfare state policies, and poverty and inequality in high income countries.

In this paper, we argue that during recent periods of welfare state retrenchment, new immigrants generally have experienced greater levels of restriction on their social rights when compared with long-term migrants and citizens. However, the extent of new immigrants' social rights (here social security) also depends on the structure of the welfare state prior to the period of retrenchment, and domestic political factors, which may either facilitate or limit the potential of government to initiate reforms that affect this group. The paper reviews the way institutional, political and macro-economic factors shape immigrant eligibility to welfare in contemporary legal systems. Drawing upon examples from Australia and Canada, we show that domestic policy considerations of social cohesion and harmonious integration, as well as concerns over welfare state costs, generally trump competing local or international values regarding possible labour law or social security entitlements of non citizens. The paper explores the theoretical argument that while institutional differences in the welfare state regimes of countries may at least partially explain the type of welfare state provision, and can even help to explain differing degrees of receptiveness to welfare provision for new immigrants within these regimes, compassion towards noncitizens ranks consistently very low within the domestic hierarchy of political values, and is trumped by the constellation of values comprising 'national sovereignty', and by other 'path dependency' values within the nation state. Our proposed future research agenda opens the opportunity to explore these theoretical arguments in more detail and across a wider range of countries to offer new insights into the worlds of immigrant welfare.

Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman once noted that free immigration cannot coexist with a welfare state. A welfare state with open borders might turn into a haven for poor immigrants, which would place such a fiscal burden on the state that native-born voters would support less-generous benefits or restricted immigration, or both. And yet a welfare state with an aging population might welcome young skilled immigrants. The preferences of the native-born population toward migration depend on the skill and age composition of the immigrants, and migration policies in a political-economy framework may be tailored accordingly. This book examines how social benefits-immigrations political economy conflicts are resolved, with an empirical application to data from Europe and the developed countries, integrating elements from population, international, public, and political economics into a unified static and dynamic framework. Using a static analytical framework to examine intra-generational distribution, the authors first focus on the skill composition of migrants in both free and restricted immigration policy regimes, drawing on empirical research from EU-15 and non-EU-15 states. The authors then offer theoretical analyses of similar issues in dynamic overlapping generations settings, studying not only intragenerational but also intergenerational aspects, including old-young dependency ratios and skilled-unskilled conflicts. Finally, they examine overall gains from or costs of migration in both host and source countries and the race to the bottom argument of tax competition between states in the presence of free migration.

Welfare States and Immigrant Rights deals with the policies and politics of immigrants' inclusion and exclusion in six countries representing different types of welfare states: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Sweden, and Denmark.