Welfare chauvinism at the policy level

Migrants’ exclusion from social benefits and programs in the established welfare states of European host countries represents a major challenge to the achievement of migrants’ social rights (Sainsbury, 2012). The present article deals with this topic from the angle of political research, and specifically the literature on the so-called “welfare chauvinism” (Andersen and Bjørklund 1990, p. 212). The article specifically focuses on welfare chauvinism at the policy level, i.e., exclusionary social policies towards migrants. Several studies have highlighted that welfare chauvinism is a nuanced concept, i.e., different forms may exist in policy frameworks and debates (strong vs. soft and direct vs. indirect chauvinism). Moreover, the strength of welfare chauvinism also varies across different types of welfare programs (means-tested and universal vs. insurance-run ones). However, the present article argues that scholars have not paid enough attention to whether and how welfare chauvinism varies (stronger/weaker, direct/indirect) across different groups of migrants. Against this background, the present paper explores how and why welfare chauvinist policies vary across four different groups: refugees, asylum-seekers, migrant workers from inside the EU and those from extra-EU countries. The analysis is specifically focused on the perspective of politicians and policy makers, i.e., the rationales and criteria they rely on to promote differentiated forms of exclusion and discrimination in the formulation of social policies. It draws from both the deservingness literature (van Oorschot 2006, 2008; Nielsen et al., 2019) and the field of research about the effect of legal status on immigrants’ policy outcomes (Fasani, 2014). The rationales and criteria are investigated by means of a qualitative content analysis of speeches made by politicians and deputies during parliamentary debates and on social networks. More specifically, the speeches analyzed are those where politicians discuss the implementation of some selected chauvinist-oriented policy reforms addressing different groups of migrants. The analysis is focused on 2 countries, Austria and the UK. These are vastly different in terms of welfare regimes, government coalitions promoting chauvinist-oriented policies, ext., but they share a similar outcome: the implementation of exclusionary policy reforms targeting the different groups of migrants mentioned above. Accordingly, these cases provide an ideal setting to comparatively explore how and why welfare chauvinism varies across these different groups.