Explaining the Immigration-Welfare State Policy Linkage in Western Europe

Western European states have increasingly linked immigration and welfare-state policy. Despite this trend’s importance to migrants’ access to social rights, scholars have presented divergent accounts of the policy reasoning underlying it. Are policymakers attempting to protect social membership definitions key to welfare-state logics? To pursue new, neoliberal welfare-state goals? To symbolically communicate immigration control intentions to voters? Or to instrumentally steer immigration flows? These accounts have rarely been tested empirically against each other. Redressing this, we employ semi-structured interviews with policymakers in a comparative process-tracing study of policies linking welfare provision and immigration status in France, Germany and the UK during the 1990s. Overall, these cases find little support for the first two hypotheses suggesting welfare-driven policy reasonings. Rather, these policies were meant to control immigration or resonate symbolically. Policies’ varying implications for migrants’ welfare access grew from existing welfare-state design differences, not from policy intentions, which were largely shared.