Welfare states of a feather flocking together? An investigation of the migration-welfare state nexus across Western Countries

Despite having all experienced substantial amounts of immigration over several decades, Western countries differ notably in how it is regulated. While there are highly-developed bodies of literature typologising and comparing states’ welfare systems, ‘varieties of capitalism’, and modes of immigration and integration respectively, it has not been shown to what extent countries take similar approaches across such institutional domains. This paper uses cluster analysis and heatmapping to explore the welfare state-migration nexus, to see if and how certain policy styles tend to align. We know there are path dependencies and elective affinities between realms of policy making, but these welfare-migration links have not been systematically analysed. Using hierarchical clustering, three groups of countries are found based on their immigration policy and integration policy, migrant welfare state exclusion, welfare state decommodification, and industrial relations. Countries from the same welfare regimes largely follow similar approaches with their migration policy, showing the broader contextual framework does have an influence on migration policy – with exceptions. Anglo countries remain distinctive with their minimal welfare state and uncoordinated economies, but policy mixes appear within the Nordic, Continental and Southern regimes. As a second step, country-level social and economic outcomes as well as public attitudes were calculated to see if they correspond to the migration-welfare clusters. The results indicate that in the group of European countries characterised by restrictive immigration policies, migrants experience higher levels of poverty and low-skill employment. Xenophobia does not correspond to a country’s policy mix, and xenophobia is lowest in the Anglo-Saxon cluster.