The Political Economy of Immigration and Welfare State Effort: Evidence from Europe 31 2.5 Concluding Remarks This article set out to examine the role that immigration has to play in determining welfare state effort in Europe through empirically testing the relationship between stocks of immigrants, as measured by the proportion of the population that is foreign-born, and welfare state effort, as measured by social welfare spending as percentage of GDP and a welfare generosity index. The results indicate that immigration has a positive impact on welfare state effort. Social welfare spending is positively and significantly associated with foreign-born and when social welfare spending is exchanged for a welfare generosity index then there is still no negative relationship between foreign-born and welfare generosity found. Moreover, after a number of tests were taken to check the robustness of the results, the headline findings remain stable. Consequently, there is no evidence to suggest that increasing immigration leads to the retrenchment of the welfare state. The results using the two indicators to express social welfare effort provide comparable results to authors who find support for the compensation hypothesis, thus providing an important contribution to existing knowledge on the political economy of immigration and welfare, as well as the wider political debate. Nevertheless, by using macro-level aggregate indicators it is difficult to pinpoint the causal relationship and future studies should be conducted in order to test the micro-level foundations of the compensation hypothesis for the ‘human face’ of globalisation. In addition, while other studies have made efforts to disaggregate welfare spending into its component programmes, the independent variable foreign-born should also be disaggregated into different types of migration, e.g. labour migration, family migration or asylum, in order to determine if different kinds of migration have different effects on social welfare effort. Finally, several theories suggest the importance of the skill-level of migrants for having divergent influences on welfare state effort, steps should be taken to test this empirically in a macro-level study. However, there are practical limitations concerning the availability of data to take into consideration in order to make such an analysis possible. These areas for further research highlight certain limitations to this study. Also important is to note that the main analysis in this article is based on 16 European countries, over the time period 1990-2010. Therefore, outside of the sensitivity analysis already conducted, the results may not be generalisable to other parts of the world, other selections of countries or other time periods. For policy makers, these results should help shed some light on a topic troubled by xenophobia, racism, and discrimination. The results that have been laid out here should contribute towards evidence-based policy making in the field of immigration and social policy. It is important to note that immigration does not seem to be leading to a ‘race-to-the-bottom’ in
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjY0ODMw