Why Immigrants Face a 'Membership Penalty' for Welfare Across Democracies

🔎 The Puzzle

Citizens often view immigrants as less deserving of welfare than native-born residents, but explanations remain contested and strategies for increasing public support for inclusive policies are unclear. Recent theory links redistribution preferences to perceptions of immigrants’ "membership commitment"—whether immigrants are seen as part of the political community.

📊 Seven-country survey, 2021–2022

An original cross-national survey conducted in seven liberal democracies in 2021–2022 measured public perceptions of immigrants’ membership commitment and examined how those perceptions affect support for extending social benefits to immigrants.

🧾 What was tested

• The relationship between perceptions of shared membership and support for inclusive redistribution.
• Whether the hypothesized "membership penalty" against immigrants appears across countries with different citizenship rules and welfare regimes.

📈 Key findings

• Perceptions of immigrants’ membership commitment are strongly associated with support for extending welfare benefits: lower perceived membership commitment corresponds to lower support for inclusive redistribution.
• Immigrants consistently suffer a clear "membership penalty" across a diverse set of liberal democracies, regardless of variation in citizenship and welfare-state arrangements.
• This penalty has measurable consequences for overall welfare-state support when debates involve immigrant recipients.

💡 Why it matters

These results provide the first systematic comparative evidence that perceptions of shared political membership shape public backing for inclusive social policy. Addressing beliefs about immigrants’ membership commitment is therefore central to efforts aimed at broadening public support for redistributive policies that include immigrant populations.