What Drives the Immigration-Welfare Policy Link? Comparing Germany, France and the United Kingdom

• DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957674
• Published date: 01 April 2021
• Author: Elisabeth Badenhoop,Sara Casella Colombeau,Mike Slaven
• Date: 01 April 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0010414020957674

Comparative Political Studies

2021, Vol. 54(5) 855 –888

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0010414020957674

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Article

What Drives the

Immigration-Welfare

Policy Link? Comparing

Germany, France and

the United Kingdom

Mike Slaven1, Sara Casella Colombeau2,

and Elisabeth Badenhoop3

Abstract

Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare

policy. This trend has important implications for European welfare-state

trajectories, but accounts of the policy reasoning behind it have diverged.

Are policymakers attempting to delimit social citizenship to secure welfare-

state legitimacy? Pursuing new, market-oriented welfare-state goals?

Symbolically communicating immigration control intentions to voters? Or

attempting to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have

rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ

83 elite interviews in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking

welfare provision and immigration status in Germany, France, and the UK

during the 1990s. We find little evidence suggesting welfare-guided policy

reasonings. Rather, this policy linkage appears “immigration-guided:” meant

to control “unwanted” immigration or resonate symbolically in immigration

politics. Differences in exclusions from welfare support for migrants grew

from existing national differences in welfare-state design and politicizations

of immigration, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared.

1University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK

2French Collaborative Institute on Migration, Paris, France

3Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Gӧttingen, Germany

Corresponding Author:

Mike Slaven, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lincoln, Bridge House,

Lincoln LN6 7TS, UK.

Email: mslaven@lincoln.ac.uk

957674CPSXXX10.1177/0010414020957674Comparative Political StudiesSlaven et al.

research-article2020

856 Comparative Political Studies 54(5)

Keywords

immigration, welfare state, welfare chauvinism, social rights, health care

Introduction

The linking of welfare-state and immigration policy domains—for instance,

by making immigration status a central criterion for social provision, or

requiring information exchange between immigration and welfare bureau-

cracies—has been a prominent trend in Western Europe amid new migra-

tion movements following the end of the Cold War. The United Kingdom’s

“hostile environment” for immigrants (Hiam et al., 2018), restrictions on

welfare provision for asylum seekers in countries like Sweden (Scarpa &

Schierup, 2018), and the incomplete inclusion of European Union migrants

in social protection schemes in countries like Germany, Austria, and

Belgium (Heindlmaier & Blauberger, 2017; Lafleur & Mescoli, 2018) dem-

onstrate how robustly this trend endures. A large literature analyzes the

effects of increasing migration on political support for welfare states

(Nannestad, 2007; Soroka et al., 2016), aiming to discern how this policy

intersection will affect social provision in Western democracies.

While the welfare-immigration policy linkage is clear and consistently

captures political and academic interest, it is less clear whether there is a

shared political logic behind it across states. Instead, past approaches to this

topic have produced plausible—but distinct and contrasting—explanations

for it. We identify four such explanations in past scholarship that serve as

broad hypotheses regarding these welfare-immigration policy links: First,

that such policies seek to delimit social citizenship, to address perceived

challenges to the legitimacy of the scope of welfare provision; second, that

they aim to further new welfare-state policy goals amidst retrenchment or

market-oriented reform; third, that they are symbolic immigration politics,

communicating hostility to immigration to a domestic political audience,

without primary concern for policies’ effects; and fourth, that they are instru-

mental immigration policies, intended to steer migration dynamics.

Systematic analysis of these four accounts is rare. This is despite the dif-

fering implications these explanations have for growing discussions about

how European welfare states will change amidst increased transnational

mobility (Kymlicka, 2015; Sciortino & Finotelli, 2015), and how migrants

will be affected (Dwyer et al., 2019). Which of those four political rationali-

ties are empirically most crucial in driving officials to adopt the immigration-

welfare linkage, in countries that differ in their historical politicizations of

migration and welfare-state designs? To redress this gap, we conduct a

Slaven et al. 857

qualitative comparative study, using process-tracing methods, of the adoption

of policies that incorporated immigration status as a criterion for social provi-

sion in Germany, France, and the United Kingdom in the 1990s, a key period

when this trend consolidated in all three countries. We present three narrative

case studies, reconstructing the deliberations leading to these policies, draw-

ing on semi-structured interviews with 83 welfare-state and immigration

policy actors. We then compare the cases in a section that tests them against

those four accounts.

Overall, our findings strongly support the latter two, “immigration-

guided” accounts. In all three cases, these linking policies were largely inte-

rior-ministry driven efforts to control “unwanted,” spontaneous forms of

immigration, or to communicate symbolically about immigration with a

domestic political audience. Moreover, where welfare logics pertained, they

were not exclusionary, against the major previous “welfare-guided” accounts.

The ways in which migrants were excluded from welfare differed in each

country, despite largely shared policy intentions. These shared “immigration-

guided” logics, yet diverging welfare effects, carry implications for how

scholars analyze the trajectory and consequences of this policy trend.

Four Accounts of the Immigration-Welfare State

Policy Linkage

Why have Western European states increasingly linked welfare-state and

immigration policy? This trend is strikingly prevalent, even though European

countries share neither generic welfare-state designs nor historic politiciza-

tions of migration. Indeed, these links are not indisputably natural ones. The

closed nature of immigration and citizenship (Bommes, 2012) and the inclu-

sive tendencies of welfare-state bureaucracies (Guiraudon, 2000) suggest

that the two sides of such policy links might naturally repel each other. We

identify four main explanations in the literature on the intersection of immi-

gration and welfare for why states elaborate such links. These accounts are

not necessarily mutually exclusive, but they suggest four quite distinct politi-

cal rationalities that may drive this process. We also identify several likely

indicators for the presence of each form of policy reasoning in establishing

these links, reflected in the key actors involved in the measures; the policies’

mode of adoption; the problem conceptions policymakers articulate sur-

rounding these policies; and policies’ implementation.1

The question, “How does immigration affect welfare states?” has become a

popular starting point in immigration policy research (Boswell & D’Amato,

2012, p. 12). Mirroring this question’s focus on the effects experienced by wel-

fare states, the first two accounts we term “welfare-guided,” since they read