Immigration Openness, Immigrant Rights, and Social Spending: A Policy Trilemma?

• In Event: Preferences in Development: Aid, Immigration, and Clientelism

Abstract

This paper is organized into three sections. The first considers two different possibilities for how these three dimensions of a more “liberal” international migration policy might be related to each other. Per the logic of embedded liberalism, immigration openness, immigrant rights, and a generous social safety net could all be packaged together. For example, with a generous social safety net, citizens may become more accepting of both immigration openness and greater rights for the admitted immigrants. However, Bearce and Connell (2023) demonstrate that even if this logic applies to trade policy (Hays, Erlich, and Peinhardt 2005), it does not fit citizen attitudes related to migration policy. We thus consider a second possibility that policymakers face a migration policy trilemma: they cannot have all three dimensions together. For example, with a more generous social safety net and greater immigrant rights, it becomes more costly to expand immigration openness especially for immigrants with lesser skill. Thus, to increase immigration openness, policymakers may need to decrease immigrant rights given a more generous social safety net, consistent with the concept of “exclusionary openness” offered by Goodman and Pepinsky (2021).

The second section empirically tests this trilemma hypothesis using social spending data from the OECD and an extended version of Bearce and Hart’s (2015, 2019) dataset tracking the annual change in de jure immigration openness and immigrant rights among 38 democratic destination countries post-1995 (i.e., the post-Cold War era). We find evidence consistent with the proposed trilemma when starting with greater social spending and more immigrant rights. While both dimensions are positively correlated with immigration openness when there is less of the other, immigration openness moves in a negative direction with greater social spending and more immigrant rights. However, we also find that when starting with greater social spending and more immigration openness, the results appear more consistent with the logic of embedded liberalism: immigrant rights move in a positive direction with greater social spending and more immigration openness.

Building from two stylized facts, the third section of the paper offers an explanation for what might appear as inconsistent results. First, there are two different international labor markets: one for higher skill immigrants (e.g., computer programmers) where demand exceeds supply and a second for lower skill immigrants (e.g., manual laborers) where supply exceeds demand. Second, governments face lobbying pressure for both higher and lower skill immigrants albeit from different sets of firms. One set lobbies for more rights to attract a smaller number of higher skill migrants who have greater external options, while a second set lobbies for more openness to obtain a larger number of lower skill migrants who have fewer external options. Thus, when migration policy already includes generous social spending and more immigrant rights, it becomes harder to accommodate the lobbying demand for lower skill immigrants given their potential cost in terms of the social safety net, consistent with the trilemma logic. However, when policy already includes generous social spending and immigration openness, it becomes easier to accommodate the lobbying demand for higher skill immigrants since they can be fit within the existing quota and help pay for the social safety net, consistent with embedded liberalism.

Authors

• David H. Bearce, Texas A&M

• Andrew F Hart, SUNY Geneseo