Revisiting Welfare Chauvinism: Immigrant Social Protection Regimes and Public Contestation of Mobility in the European Union 

Following the economic crisis and, more recently, the Brexit referendum, mobile citizens are increasingly depicted as burdens in discourses and social policy reforms adopted by many EU Member States. This paper seeks to examine the interplay between social protection regimes and the public contestation of mobility across European democracies in a changing context characterised by populism and increasing anti-immigrant political discourses. The first part of the paper aims to provide a comprehensive comparison of the regimes of social protection that European host countries offer to foreign residents. Drawing on an original dataset within the framework of the MiTSoPro project, the paper will thus rank European countries according to the level of inclusiveness or exclusiveness of the array of social benefits that they offer to non-national residents across different policy areas including pensions, health care, family benefits and unemployment benefits. The second part of the paper links the patterns of convergence and divergence in the degree of inclusiveness in welfare state provisions towards migrants with recent trends of public contestation of mobility across EU member States. In doing so, we seek to understand to what extent more inclusive regimes of immigrant social protection lead to higher degrees of contestation of mobility at the domestic level. We argue that this is more likely to occur especially when an inclusive welfare system is coupled with a sizable demographic share of immigrant populations, high salience of immigration in public debates and the presence and electoral success of anti-immigrant parties in the national parliamentary arena.