Increasing legal migration overstretches social services
Soroka et al., ‘3 [Stuart Soroka, McGill University; Keith Banting, Queen’s University; and Richard Johnston, University of British Columbia, “Immigration And Redistribution In A Global Era,” forthcoming in Globalization and the Politics of Redistribution, Russell Sage Foundation, December 1, 2003, http://degreesofdemocracy.mcgill.ca/other/ImmigrationandRedistribution.pdf]
The literature suggests a number of possible pathways or links between immigration and social spending: A. Increased immigration is associated with increased social spending, at least in the short term: 1. In Europe and the United States, recent immigrants have lower levels of education and training, weaker economic performance, and heavier reliance on unemployment and social assistance benefits than both previous generations of immigrants and natives. 2. Immigrants tend to be younger on average than natives, altering the demographic profile of the country and raising expenditures on child-related programs, such as child benefits and education. B Increased immigration leads to reduced social spending: 1. For the same reason, that immigrants tend to be younger than natives, immigration reduces the share of the population over 65. To the extend that the welfare state is oriented more to the old than the young, immigration reduces demand for social services quasi-automatically, and this alone would create a negative relationship between immigration and social spending. This relationship would be causal, certainly not spurious, but in contrast to the effect in A.2., it is of little political consequence. Its possibility alerts us to the need for a fully specified setup, however. Conceivably, over the full life-cycle the net demographic impact of immigration on the destination country’s fiscal position is small and ambiguous. 2. Most critically, increasing proportions of “new” beneficiaries – who have not been contributors – may lead to a decline in general public support for redistributive policies, whatever the beneficiary group. 3. Immigration could lead to pressures to reduce the eligibility of immigrants in particular for welfare. If immigrants come to dominate the traditional categories of welfare eligibility, this would reduce the system’s overall transfer capacity or limit growth in social expenditures. 4. Over time, political resistance to high levels of immigration increases support for conservative political parties. In the European context, the vehicle for this protest tends to be radical right-wing parties. Voters supporting such parties may not intend any signal about the welfare state but find themselves inadvertently sending such a signal anyway.