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Migrants' Social Rights, Ethnicity and Welfare Regimes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 October 2005

ANN MORISSENS
Affiliation:
Department of Social Sciences, University of Roskilde, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark, email: [email protected].
DIANE SAINSBURY
Affiliation:
Department of Political Science, University of Stockholm, S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden, email: [email protected].

Abstract

Comparative welfare state research has devoted little attention to the social rights of migrants or the ethnic/racial dimension, even though societies are becoming more ethnically diverse through international migration. Using data from the Luxembourg Income Study for the UK, the USA, Germany, France, Denmark and Sweden, this article represents an initial attempt to compare the social rights of migrants and citizens across welfare regimes. We examine the substantive social rights of migrants and ethnic minorities by focusing on their participation in social transfer programmes, and the impact of transfers on their ability to maintain a socially acceptable standard of living compared with the rest of the population. The analysis shows that there are major disparities between how migrant and citizen households fare in welfare states, and that the discrepancies widen for migrants of colour. When the analysis is confined to citizen households, the results largely correspond to the expected performance of welfare regimes. However, when migrants are incorporated into the analysis, intra-regime variations stand out in the case of the liberal and social democratic countries.

Type
Article
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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