Immigrants’ Welfare Spending Preferences and the Group-Interest Effect: A Study of Immigrants in the Netherlands

Previous research has underlined that benefit recipients are in stronger support of the welfare state compared to non-recipients. Findings often emphasize that immigrants are one of the societal groups with a higher risk of becoming welfare recipients due to the factors such as language barriers. This results in the assumption that the welfare state support is generally larger among immigrants than among natives. Very few studies, however, have investigated immigrants’ attitudes toward the welfare state. In this paper, we examine the different societal positions of immigrant groups based on their national share of welfare recipients in the receiving country (group-interest) and its effect on immigrants’ welfare state attitudes. Drawing upon migrant integration literature, this paper discusses how the individual loyalty toward the target immigrant group affects the association between the group-interest and welfare state attitudes considering individual self-interest preferences and the state socialization argument. A new survey dataset, Migrant’s Attitudes toward the Welfare State (MIFARE), is used for the statistical analysis. This dataset is designed for the purpose of assessing immigrants’ welfare state attitudes and is set out among Dutch natives and ten different immigrant groups from both EU and non-EU countries allowing for a comparison design. Alternative section: Responses to International Migration in Contemporary Europe