Intra-EU Labour Migration and Attitudes Towards the Welfare State 101 foreign-born population at the national- or macro-level has little effect on support. Thus, a more immediate and personal experience of immigration may have a more relevant effect on support for government redistribution than national-level immigration. However, the two measures – foreign-born as a percentage of the population and the proportion of foreign-born of total employment in each occupation are highly correlated (0.98) and so it would perhaps be surprising to find opposite effects for these two indicators. Following on from this, Burgoon and Rooduijn (2021) show how both the antisolidarity hypothesis and the compensation hypothesis may be present at the same time and that the prevailing mechanism depends strongly on the macro-level context of the country. They found that anti-immigrant sentiments are likely tied to lower support for government redistribution when a respondent’s country faces more immigration, has relatively generous levels of welfare provision, and when immigrants are drawing proportionately more upon the welfare state than natives. 5.2.3 Different effects for different groups? Alongside the national context interacting with the way immigration may alter attitudes towards the welfare state, it would be entirely reasonable to expect that different types of movement influence attitudes towards social protection in diverse ways. It could be that the defining characteristics of the migrant population or of the migrants themselves may alter preferences. As such, perceptions or stereotypes of hypothetical or potential policy beneficiaries can shape the concerns and politics surrounding that policy (Schneider & Ingram, 1993). Consequently, the way researchers choose to operationalise migration and various forms of mobility are thus likely to have an effect on the results and interpretations of studies. The argument, however, is often formulated in terms of the threat that immigration presents and the resulting response from an individual. For example, opposition to immigration or specific migrant groups typically increases as the social distance3 does. This may vary depending on the type of threat, such as symbolic threat expressed as the fear of loss of culture, values and norms, and the national identity of the host society or economic threat like the loss of a job or earnings, and then the level of threat (minimal or great) attributed to immigrants (Bogardus, 1947; Davidov et al., 2020, Heath et al., 2020). The type of threat attributed to migrants can then have a resulting impact on various social policy preferences. Haselswerdt (2021) shows that when individuals in the US are primed to think about different types of threats, either economic or symbolic threat, this results in different assumptions as to whether a social welfare policy will benefit immigrants to 3 Social distance is a concept from social psychology. It illustrates the distance between individuals or social groups in society, which can increase or decrease as members of a group feel closer or more removed from members of another group dependent on various characteristics, prejudices, and/or perceived likenesses, for example.
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