Migration and Welfare State Spending

New patterns of international migration have altered the demographic landscape of liberal-democratic countries. New forms of difference have generated new political pressures and sparked debates about traditional conceptions of identity and community, as well as the rights and mutual obligations embedded in citizenship. In this context, many commentators have wondered whether relatively diverse societies are less likely than relatively homogeneous ones to invest in social programs. Analysts have pointed to different levels of ethnic diversity in explaining differences between US and European social welfare programs; studies comparing social expenditures across US cities and states have found that ethnically heterogeneous states tend to spend less on redistributive programs; and economists have found similar patterns across a wide range of countries.

This paper builds upon these investigations by making use of a recent body of data on social expenditure, across European countries from 1980 to 2010, disaggregated into sub-domains (such as unemployment benefits, pensions, etc.). In so doing, it explores the extent to which increased migration has greater impacts on some welfare programs than others. Migration, in turn, is measured in a slightly more nuanced way than in our previous work; we examine the possibility that refugees have a greater (more negative) impact on spending than migrants more generally. Results thus add to the existing literature in two ways, disaggregating both social spending and immigrant flows to better understand the implications of migration for redistributive policies.