94 Chapter 4 disentangle how the influence of immigration on social protection may vary depending on who immigrates. Relying on indicators which explicitly measure intra-EU labour mobility, we find larger positive associations for mobile workers from Central and East European countries than for mobile workers from other Western-European countries and for immigration in general. This finding suggests that in the case of labour migration the increased demand for compensating increased labour market risks in the form of more generous unemployment and social assistance benefits is stronger than concerns about how immigrants put pressure on the fiscal sustainability of the welfare state. That this effect is more pronounced for immigration from CEE countries than for immigration from other WesternEuropean countries probably reflects the rapid increase of labour mobility from CEE countries since 2004. Moreover, we do not find any coherent evidence to draw conclusions about whether the programme design of a particular social policy, such as whether a benefit is contributory or noncontributory/targeted or universal, alters the association between labour mobility and welfare state effort. Moreover, even though our analysis of welfare state effort includes different programme-specific measures to control for the number of beneficiaries and we examine replacement rates in addition to social spending data, one limitation of our study is that we do not focus on other institutional dimensions such as the access to welfare state programmes. These dimensions could be of particular interest in the context of migration as welfare chauvinism mechanisms could play a role (Cappelen et al., 2025; Negash & van Vliet 2024; Röth et al., 2022). This could be an interesting avenue for future research, although the variation in the extent to which intra-EU migrants have access to welfare state programmes is very limited across EU countries. In addition, future research should aim to shed further light on disaggregated groups of immigration and their influence on welfare state reform, particularly as more detailed data on various forms of human mobility becomes available to researchers.
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