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ABSTRACT
It has convincingly been argued that in the United States, immigration is detrimental to welfare state support. In Europe, on the other hand, there is little evidence for such a negative relationship. This article examines whether a particular type of immigration – rapidly escalating intra-European Union (EU) immigration – reduces public support for the welfare state. We argue that because EU states cannot discriminate against resident EU nationals from other countries in the field of social security, intra-EU immigration will negatively affect attitudes towards welfare spending. To test this expectation, we use data from the European Social Survey of 2008, among other sources. The results of our multilevel analyses document a negative relationship between intra-EU immigration and welfare state support, supporting our hypothesis.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank John Erik Fossum, Stein Kuhnle, Michaël Tatham, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments. The usual disclaimers apply.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
Note on contributors
Cornelius Cappelen is a researcher at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway
Yvette Peters is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Comparative Politics, University of Bergen, Norway
Notes
1. A number of factors are thought to challenge the legitimacy of the welfare state. For example, economic globalization can limit the capacity of states to determine their own policies, including their social policies (Alesina and Perotti Citation1997). Furthermore, it has been argued that the aging of the world's national populations renders welfare states unsustainable, owing to e.g., generous pension provisions and increasing health care costs (Pierson Citation1998).
2. Based on data from the UK, Ford et al. (Citation2015) find that British reactions to migrants are conditioned by where they come from, why they come and what they offer. Opposition to (wealthy) white migrants is lower than to (poorer) non-white migrants, skilled labour migrants are more welcome than unskilled migrants, and finally majorities supported cuts to asylum migration as well as family reunification migration, but only small minorities wanted reductions related to college or university-related migration.
5. However, this does not necessarily imply that intra-EU immigration has no negative effect per se. We only examined a cross-section of 2008. There is a possibility that countries that now have a high number of intra-EU immigrants had higher levels of spending even before EU immigration. In such cases, there would have been a positive relationship, and a negative finding in 2008 may imply a negative effect of EU migration. Therefore, future research should investigate this link more thoroughly and over time.