Social Protection for Mobile Populations? A Global Perspective on Immigrant Welfare Rights

A prominent claim asserts that in the Global North most migrants eventually enjoy comprehensive welfare rights which are comparable to those of citizens. However, until recently, little comparative data existed to test such assertions. Even less is known about how migrants may access benefits in emerging welfare states in the Global South. The Migrant Social Protection (MigSP) Dataset fills these research gaps by providing a set of quantitative comparative measures of de jure immigrant welfare rights in regard to unemployment insurance and social assistance benefits in 39 countries in Europe, Latin America, North America, Oceania and Southeast Asia for the years 1980-2018. This paper presents this new resource, outlining the conceptualization and operationalization of the indicators as well as conceptual challenges associated with the broad geographical coverage of the dataset. In the empirical section we show that there is variation both between countries/world regions as well as over time. Furthermore, immigrant welfare rights continue to be differentiated along residency status and benefit type, with permanent migrants enjoying more rights than temporary ones, and access to social assistance being more restricted than access to unemployment insurance. Results also show that although immigrant rights are never equivalent to those granted to citizens, in all world regions there are examples of inclusion and exclusion. We end the paper with discussing which factors may explain differences in trajectories and levels of immigrant welfare rights, outlining avenues for future research.