Differentiating welfare provision across categories of migrants: an insight from Italy and Austria.

In contemporary times, European societies are becoming increasingly diversified, also due to increasing migration flows from both within and outside Europe. The present article examines how national governments deal with such a diversity in the social policy field specifically. It builds on the literature on the so-called welfare chauvinism (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, p.212), i.e., a political view promoting nativism as the main guiding principle in social provision. A recent strand of research within the broader welfare chauvinism literature has started to examine the different arguments used to legitimize and justify welfare chauvinism policies and proposals by politicians and political parties (Jorgensen and Thomsen, 2016; Keskinen 2016; Noricel 2016). These studies examine how the different deservingness/undeservingness categories are constructed in the policy debate in relation to welfare states and migrants’ entitlement to welfare benefits and services in the host country. However, we still lack a theoretical framework to derive expectations about how politicians exploit these different arguments and framing practices within in the policy debate. The present article proposes a theoretical argument to generate expectations with regard to this question. More specifically, it argues that politicians use different types of arguments of deservingness and undeservingness depending on the specific category of migrants they refer to. More precisely, it is argued that welfare chauvinism towards extra-European migrants (refugees or labor migrants from extra-European areas) relies on a construction of migrants as culturally deviant, whilst welfare chauvinist towards European more likely points back to economic argument of undeservingness (although the EU legal framework makes more difficult for them to implement chauvinist-oriented reforms). The analysis assesses the hypotheses by focusing on two specific cases: Austria and Italy. While being very different from several perspectives, in both countries several welfare chauvinist policies were proposed and, in some cases, passed by right-wing politicians in the period 2017-2019, corresponding to the Kurz I cabinet (Austria) and the Conte I cabinet (Italy). I proceed by relying on an in-depth qualitative content analysis of parliamentary debates and speeches preceding and leading to the approval of such policies in the two countries, during the aforementioned period. The preliminary findings partially confirm the expectations: extra-European migrants are more vulnerable to the ethno-cultural argument, yet this argument also applies to European migrants in several cases. Overall, the article’s contribution is twofold. It is intended to contribute to the literature on welfare chauvinism in parties’ policy platforms by clarifying how parties publicly endorse a lower level of solidarity towards different categories migrants. At the same time, it also wants to contribute to the research about migration policies and, more specifically, to the broader reflection about the governance and challenges of diversity within European societies.