Democracy, Pro-Immigrant Attitudes and Immigrant Welfare Rights

Two competing hypotheses could be formulated on the relationship between democracy and immigrant welfare rights. In democracies, politicians advocate for and implement restrictions to appeal to welfare chauvinist opinions in the electorate. It has been widely shown that Populist Radical Right Parties are the main driver of welfare chauvinist reform, and that mainstream parties also increasingly take up the issue. As immigrants’ political representation is limited, their interests are less likely to be responded to in electoral democracies. Based on this, one would expect that democracy is not necessarily conducive to immigrant welfare rights. However, a positive relationship between democracy and immigrant welfare rights could also be hypothesized. Democratic institutions allow for a more active and effective civil society, which allows those sections of society that hold pro-immigrant attitudes to lobby for protection of minority rights more effectively. To test these two competing hypotheses, we comparatively assess 38 countries in Latin America, Europe, North America and Southeast Asia over the period 1980-2018, using newly collected comparative data on the welfare rights of immigrants and different democracy indicators from the V-Dem Dataset. We find that countries with more generous immigrant welfare rights tend to be more democratic than those that restrict rights. Based on these descriptive findings, we choose two country cases, Argentina and Malaysia, to investigate how different political regimes provide different opportunity structures for organizing pro-immigrant attitudes - including immigrant activists - to successfully advocate for immigrant welfare rights.