Ethnic Diversity at Work and Support for Immigrant Entitlements

• In Event: Labor and Civil Rights in an Era of Rising Populism

Abstract

The increase in migrant workers, such as from Poland and Bulgarian, in western-European countries over the past decade has fueled the debate on the sustainability of European welfare states. Right-wing populist parties have jumped into this debate, by claiming that entitlements to social and civil rights should be confined to natives. Given the rise in popularity of right-wing populist parties, this so-called welfare chauvinism is an increasingly popular position among the public of western-European societies. Studies on welfare chauvinism typically attribute the phenomenon to cultural threat, economic competition over resources, and views on deservingness and reciprocity. As such, little attention has been given to processes at work that might as well have an influence on people’s support for immigrant entitlements to social and civil rights. This is surprising, given that the work context is the prime social environment in which people interact with, for example, the eastern-European ‘newcomers’. Further, increasing labor migration has fueled the debate on welfare chauvinism. In this paper, we study how ethnic diversity at work influences support for immigrant entitlements. We do so by innovatively combining insights on interethnic interactions, taken from both contact theory and cultural capital theory, with social capital theory. We rely on unique survey data from the Netherlands (N=6346) containing detailed information on the ethnic composition of the workplace, interethnic contact and social resources at work and outside work, as well as support for immigrant entitlements. Overall, this study underlines the importance of studying social relations at work for understanding current (developments in) political preferences, such as support for immigrant entitlements.

Authors

• Katerina manevska, Radboud University

• Agnes Akkerman

• Marcel Lubbers

• Roderick Sluiter, Radboud University Nijmegen