Topic: Immigration and the Evolution of the American Welfare State

Speaker: Dr. Xu Ping (University of Rhode Island (USA))

Time: 15:30, Thursday, October 19, 2017

Venue: Room 107, No.5 Building, Wushan Campus

[Abstract]

Scholars have long found that public support for social welfare is influenced by the prevalence of racial minority groups at large and/or in the welfare population itself. The underlying logic is that people do not want to give out public goods to benefit people who are not like themselves. In this paper, we examine how the increasing immigrant population in the United States influences public support for the welfare state. We propose three mechanisms through which immigration could possibly influence public welfare support: (1) immigrant-induced diversity, (2) immigrants’ heavy consumption of welfare, and (3) attitudes toward immigrants or immigration. In order to test these three mechanisms, we merge macro-level contextual data on % of foreign-born population, % of foreign-born households actually using social welfare with micro-level public opinion data from the Cumulative American National Election Survey (ANES). From our multilevel models, we discover that the % of foreign-born population in the state where the respondent resides and negative opinions about immigrants or immigration both depress welfare support. However, the actual percentage of immigrants consuming social welfare in respondents’ home states does not have any effect on their welfare support. Our results echo previous findings in public opinion literature that suggest the American public’s support or lack thereof for a particular program is not based on the actual use of the program by a minority group but on the perception of their use and the heterogeneity of the state’s population as a whole.