Immigration, integration and support for redistribution in Europe

Immigration can be expected to have offsetting implications for public support for redistribution. On the one hand, immigration poses individual or collective economic risks that might make citizens more likely to support government redistribution, but on the other it can generate fiscal pressure or undermine social solidarity to diminish such support. These offsetting conditions may be responsible for the substantively and statistically modest net effects of redistribution for welfare state politics in existing studies. This paper argues that these effects are strongly mediated by the economic and social integration of immigrants - the degree to which they have unemployment levels, reliance on the welfare state, and harbor social attitudes in line with those of the native population. Such integration should influence how immigration affects solidarity and poses fiscal and macro-economic pressures but not so much how immigration spurs economic risks. In societies where immigrants are more integrated by such measures, proportionately higher foreign-born population should have less negative or more positive implications for native support for government redistribution than where immigrants are less integrated. The paper finds support for this argument in European Social Survey data of publics in 22 European countries between 2002 and 2008. The economic and social integration of immigrants, hence, may be crucial to dampening any negative effects that immigration has for redistributive policies and welfare states.