Immigration dominated recent election campaigns in countries that include the United Kingdom, France, Germany and the United States.
The subject sparked particularly fierce debates over welfare. While some politicians called for more support for typically economically vulnerable immigrant populations, others argued that welfare systems are already too generous and accommodating to newcomers.
Unfortunately, many debates on this subject lack solid evidence. A newly launched data set could change that. The data, which provides systematic information on immigrants’ access to social programs across different countries and different time periods, can help ground some of these discussions in empirical reality.
The data set reveals key insights. One striking observation is that the countries where politicians most frequently complain that immigrants are treated too generously are among the most exclusionary from a comparative perspective.
It also shows that although most welfare systems were moving towards greater inclusion up until the 2010s, since then social programs in many countries have become more inclusive in some respects but more exclusive in others.
A new data set for 22 countries
The data set, called the Immigrant Exclusion from Social Programs Index (IESPI), measures how much immigrants’ access to pensions, health care, unemployment benefits, housing benefits, social assistance and active labour market programs compares to that of native-born citizens.
The index uses 32 indicators to measure factors like whether immigrants have to have resided in the country for a certain period of time, held a specific type of residence status, or met standards of successful integration before they can access social programs.
The data covers the years 1990 to 2023 and includes information for 22 countries.
Complaints about inclusion
In the United States, President Donald Trump has voiced concerns about immigrants’ welfare access repeatedly, both during his first term and since taking office again this year.
In last year’s British election, a staple of Rishi Sunak’s campaign was the insistence that immigrants threaten the sustainability of the welfare state.
On the other side of the North Sea, the political party that won the Dutch elections made the argument that immigrants are “pampered” a central feature of its election platform.
Ironically, all three of these countries are among the most exclusionary, according to the most recent IESPI data, as the graph below illustrates. (Note that the IESPI is organized such that a value of 0 is maximally inclusionary and 100 is maximally exclusionary.)
Inclusionary trends have ended
A second observation is that the era of social welfare systems becoming more inclusive for immigrants has ended.
From 1990 until the 2010s, most western welfare systems were removing barriers for immigrant access to social programs. But since then, levels of immigrant welfare exclusion have not changed dramatically over time.
Closer inspection shows that this picture of stability since the 2010s hides negative trends in different social programs.
On the one hand, health-care programs and active labour market policies have gradually become more inclusionary. More and more countries have been making health-care services accessible for vulnerable immigrant populations, and rolling out targeted programs to improve newcomers’ chances on the labour market.
On the other hand, social assistance policies have generally become more exclusionary over time. Many countries have intensified restrictions for recent arrivals, migrants without permanent residence status and migrants who cannot demonstrate successful integration.
Large differences in historical trajectories
When we look beyond aggregate trends, we also note very different trajectories in different countries.
In some countries (Austria, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Malta, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain), social programs have become consistently more inclusionary.
Other countries (Canada, Luxembourg and Sweden) have also undergone an inclusionary development, although at a more modest pace of change.
In a third set of countries (Australia, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Norway and Switzerland), policies initially became more inclusionary but this trend was halted or reversed around 2010. The social programs of three other countries (the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States), finally, have consistently become more exclusionary over time.
These comparisons within the IESPI data set hopefully enable us to make sense of the frequently charged nature of discussions about immigrants’ access to social programs.
Most obviously, they show we should be cautious when listening to some of the politicians who are most critical of immigrant welfare access, like Donald Trump, Rishi Sunak and Geert Wilders.
If their arguments that exclusionary reforms in their countries are nothing but reasonable adjustments to overly generous approaches ever had any merit, that merit is quickly evaporating.
Edward Koning received funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada to collect the data for this project.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
