Edward Anthony Koning’s new book examines variation in the politics of immigrant-excluding welfare reforms (IEWRs) over time and across three countries—Sweden, Canada, and the Netherlands—all of which have experienced significant immigration in the past two decades. The book’s main finding is “that the politics of immigrant welfare exclusion are more about general opposition to immigration and multiculturalism than about concerns over the economic effects of immigration and the sustainability of the welfare state” (p. 5). Justifying IEWRs by emphasizing the economic costs of immigration, the author concludes, “seems to be little more than a façade for hiding ideological objections to immigration and ethnic diversity” (p. 202).
The data consist of interviews with parliamentarians and civil servants, and the book includes analysis of public opinion surveys, data on immigrant use of welfare services, parliamentary debates, party manifestos, and policy documents. The author systematically applies three questions to each of the three country case studies to explain the politics of IEWRs. First, how are official statements about the economic costs of immigration framed? Second, what role do national identity and the specific welfare state regime play in the “translation” of public opinion into the production of IEWRs? Third, does the domestic, EU-specific (for Sweden and the Netherlands) and international law environment (for Canada) systematically mediate how far IEWRs can be advanced?
In Sweden, the politics of IEWR’s unfolds against the background of a universalist welfare regime and an egalitarian political culture that is compassionate and frames migrants as being in a “lamentable” (p. 78) position. Economic facts of the costs of immigration play a subordinate role, and national and international legal obligations tend to favor even more inclusion, leading to an “absence of IEWRs in contemporary Swedish politics” (p. 108). In Canada, the economic costs of immigration play an equally subordinate role. Canadian judges’ power of judicial review and its common law tradition combine with the federal nature of Canada’s welfare system to conspire to stop attempts at imposing IEWRs, leading to a stable immigration policy. Canada’s history as a pro-immigration country, its constitutionally protected multiculturalism, and its generally successful integration of migrants, in combination, have led to few attempts at implementing IEWRs. In the Netherlands, however, migrants’ dependence on the welfare state is framed as them having a penchant for drawing benefits—a frame that is advanced by the Partij van de Vrijheid (PVV), an anti-immigrant party. Moreover, Koning claims that the Netherlands’ reputation as liberal and open to diversity no longer applies. Instead, immigration and multiculturalism have “led to a more exclusionary conception of Dutch national identity” (p. 168). The Netherlands “has almost reached the limit of how far it can realistically go in excluding immigrants from the welfare state” (p. 193); indeed Dutch policy makers would have gone further if they had not been “bound by national and international legal prohibitions on differential treatment” (p. 210).
This book enables a much deeper understanding of the drivers of selective solidarity, rather than perpetuating the notion that welfare retrenchment happens in toto. Particularly impressive is the focus on how the discourse on the economic costs of immigration is constructed. It is rare that such framing effects are systematically examined to shed light on the politics of selective solidarity. Investigating the intricacies of social rights across time and space for different categories of migrants can be challenging, even tedious work. This book succeeds admirably by tracing the processes of the politics of IEWRs, combining rich detail without losing sight of the overall theoretical framework. To my knowledge this is the first book to examine welfare chauvinism at such a fine level of granularity in a comparative perspective and across time.
Yet the very approach this book takes also makes it susceptible to a variety of critiques. For instance, concepts such as “national identity” or “political culture” feature prominently in explanations as to why IEWRs are successful or not. One could quibble whether these concepts are used in too reductionist a way or a bit too cursorily. This is not to say that variations in political culture and national identity might not have the asserted effects on IEWRs. However, it is simply assumed that these concepts have the expected effects, but the precise mechanism remains underspecified. The author does attempt to shore up these assertions by marshaling quotes from personal interviews with parliamentarians and civil servants, but this is thin ice to skate on, particularly given when the interviews were conducted. The ones for Sweden and the Netherlands were conducted in the winter and spring of 2011, and most of the interviews for Canada were conducted in the summer of 2011. For a book that is published in 2019, these interviews are outdated, especially given that the Mediterranean refugee crisis unfolded in the fall/spring of 2015–16 and had a profound effect on how the Dutch and Swedes perceived migrants and immigration. Fortunately, the other types of evidence such as election results, parliamentary debates, public opinion surveys, and other policy documents are of more recent provenance, making the empirical findings more credible. Finally, it is not clear which of the three explanations—framing of economic costs of immigration, national identity and political culture, or the domestic/EU/international legal environment—are more or less important in explaining the politics of IEWRs across the three cases. Although the author makes a plausible argument about the weights that each of these claims contribute to the overall outcome, it is still based on a good bit of his interpretation of the evidence.
These critiques notwithstanding, this is an impressive contribution. It follows Karl Deutsch’s dictum that “truth lies at the confluence of independent streams of evidence.” By examining and weighing different types of evidence, and applying a variety of methods, Koning’s triangulation strategy succeeds in telling a convincing story of the central drivers of IEWRs. This book is a welcome departure from the burgeoning literature on welfare chauvinism, which too often relies almost exclusively on public opinion surveys. By emphasizing the interconnections of national identities, welfare state regimes, the framing of the economic costs of immigration, and political party dynamics, this book weaves a rich tapestry of policies that unfold over time and are then carefully compared based on a theoretically derived framework that is applied equally to all three cases. It will be enjoyed by those who study the dynamics of change in the social rights of immigrants in a comparative setting.
