Immigration Policy and Social Policy Since the 1930s

• In Event: The Boundaries of Citizenship and Belonging

Abstract

The nature of the relationship between immigration controls and the welfare state is debated in the social sciences. Some scholars argue that there is a trade-off between generous social policies and openness to immigration. They therefore expect the welfare state to become less generous in countries that remove immigration controls, and they expect political leaders who wish to preserve the welfare state to adopt stricter policies on immigration. Other scholars argue, for a variety of reasons, that there is no contradiction between generous social policies and openness to immigration; indeed, some scholars even believe that there is a positive relationship between the two.
Recent scholarship on the relationship between migration policy and social policy emphasizes the differences among welfare state models and the differences among types of migration. We believe that both of these distinctions are important, but we point out that a major problem with previous research is that the analyses typically starts at a point in time when different welfare state models already existed, and distinctions among clearly defined types of migration were already established. Existing scholarship thus fails to consider the fact that social policy and migration policy have co-evolved over a long period of time. As we point out in the paper, conclusions that are based on evidence from the last few decades, or static comparisons between countries, are likely to be flawed.
In this paper, we instead analyze the co-evolution of national immigration controls and national welfare-state programs in a sample of eighteen countries between 1930 and 2010. We study legislation concerning the admission of two types of migrants: on the one hand labor migrants, and on the other hand refugees and the family members of resident migrants, showing how the distinction between these types of migrants became established. We then show how the relationship between admission policies and the welfare state has developed between the inter-war period and the present day. In doing this, we are able to take into account important developments not only within the area of social policy, but also within the area of international migration. Among other things, we explicitly address the evolution of the international human rights regime and how it is related to policies toward refugees and asylum seekers, as well as non-citizens more generally.
The paper’s main finding is that policies concerning the admission of labor migrants and policies concerning the admission of refugees and family members have followed very different paths, which means that the connection between immigration policies and the welfare state are very different for different types of migration. Over time, a negative empirical relationship has emerged between generous social policies and openness to labor migration, as the welfare-chauvinism literature leads us to expect; but there is a positive empirical relationship between generous social policies and generous policies vis-à-vis refugees and the family members of resident migrants.
In sum, our paper makes several important contributions: we distinguish between different types of migration and develop distinct theoretical predictions for these types of migration; we measure immigration policy directly, adding a large number of observations to the important new dataset that was introduced by Margaret Peters (2015); and we study the long-run relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state. On this basis, we show that several widely held beliefs about the relationship between immigration policy and the welfare state need to be reevaluated.

Authors

• Frida Boräng, University of Gothenburg

• Sara Kalm, Lund University

• Johannes Lindvall, Lund University