The Role of Middle Class Involvement for the Nexus of Immigration and Welfare

• In Event: Migrants, Refugees, and Social Policies

Abstract

In the last years, an extensive body of scholarship in economics, sociology and political science has claimed that encompassing and generous welfare states might in general be incompatible with large-scale immigration (Alesina and Glaeser 2004). This expectation, often referred to as the New Progressive Dilemma (Goodhart 2004), is highly motivated by the US master narrative, where a multi-racial society in combination with a longstanding history of immigration encounters very limited welfare provision. On the individual level, much seems to speak for the argument that the conflictual relationship between anti-immigrant sentiments and low levels of welfare support is resembled also outside the US context (Burgoon 2014). On the macro-level, however, analyses regressing welfare spending on immigration come to inconclusive results, sometimes seeing immigration restricting, sometimes seeing it increasing welfare budgets (Soroka et al. 2015).
In this paper, we address this puzzle by pointing to the role of welfare institutions for the relationship between immigration and welfare state retrenchment. Again referring to the US case, we separate welfare programs according to their degree of middle-class involvement, ranging from very low (means-tested and tax-financed programs like TANF) to very high (universal and contribution-based programs like Social Security). As exemplified in the US, we expect immigration to cause problems only in the TANF-like programs because of the limited interest of middle-class voters in financing programs they cannot expect to benefit from themselves. Constructing program-specific indices of middle-class involvement for the insurance areas of pensions, health care and unemployment in 16 OECD countries for the period from 1970 to 2010, we then test their moderating effect for the impact of immigration on welfare spending applying TSCS models. Our tentative results indicate that programs with low degrees of middle-class involvement do indeed react to immigration by decreasing budgets. However, when middle-class voters have a strong interest in programs, the reaction to immigration is an increase in budgets accompanied by policies of welfare chauvinism.

References

Alesina, Alberto, and Edward L. Glaeser. 2004. Fighting Poverty in the US and Europe: A World of Difference. Oxford u.a.: Oxford University Press.
Burgoon, Brian. 2014. “Immigration, Integration and Support for Redistribution in Europe.” World Politics 66(3): 365–405.
Goodhart, David. 2004. “Too Diverse?” Prospect 95: 30–37.
Soroka, Stuart N. et al. 2015. “Migration and Welfare State Spending.” European Political Science Review 8(2): 173-194.

Authors

• Dennis Christopher Spies, University of Cologne

• Alexander W. Schmidt-Catran, University of Cologne