Transcript
Speaker: I'm Jane Williams. This is the Red Eye Podcast. You can hear our live broadcast on Saturday mornings from 10 till noon at 100.5 FM in the Lower Mainland.
Speaker: On the podcast today, Lorraine Chisholm talks with political scientist Edward Koning about the far-right's false narrative on immigrants and the social welfare system.
Speaker: In recent years, the narrative of immigrants being a drain on the system has been repeated constantly in some Western countries. But we should question how that narrative stacks up against the evidence.
Speaker: A new data set that includes 22 countries shed some light on the answer. Spoiler alert, our guest today says one striking observation is that the countries where politicians most frequently complain that immigrants are treated too generously are among the most exclusionary from a comparative perspective.
Speaker: Edward Koning is Associate Professor in Political Science at the University of Guelph, and I'm pleased to welcome him to Red Eye. Hello, Edward. Hi. Glad you could join us to talk about this.
Speaker: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me. I think most people have heard a lot of rhetoric about immigrants being a drain on the system. Can you sketch out the key stories that are being told about this?
Speaker: Yeah, I think this is a very salient subject in political debate. During election time, you hear about it all the time. I think sometimes the version of this argument is relatively benign, and it is just pointing out that on average,
Speaker: immigrants are more likely to rely on certain social programs than native-born citizens. And this is just ah an observable fact in many countries. But very often, this takes more accusatory and divisive tones.
Speaker: And so the argument is more becoming something along the lines of immigrants are lazy, or they actually deliberately moved to this particular country because they wanted to take advantage of the system.
Speaker: Or it's just part of a more general rhetoric that wants to draw lines between people in terms of who we owe something to and who we don't. How widespread is this political theme and and who are we hearing it from?
Speaker: So I would say it's pretty widespread. I mean, I must admit that most of my research focus on what we usually call the industrialized West. So basically, Europe and North America, Australia, New Zealand. And in all those countries, this rhetoric is alive and well.
Speaker: Certainly, we hear it most clearly from the populist right. So ah what we sometimes refer to as anti-immigrant parties. But especially over the last 15 years or so, you can hear it a loud and clear from the center-right, the mainstream center-right party in most European countries as well.
Speaker: And actually, the labor parties in many European countries have also been voicing some version of this argument because they are actually the kinds of parties that often lose a lot of votes to anti-immigrant parties.
Speaker: I want to get you to explain a couple of the terms that you're using in your analysis. What do you mean when you say countries are exclusionary or inclusive where immigrants make use of the safety nets in place in various countries?
Speaker: Yeah, thanks for that question. So I think... What I've tried to do with this data set is just map what I call the level of differentiation between native-born citizens and immigrants in the extension of seven different social programs.
Speaker: And so essentially, I have coded all the information such that higher scores mean that the programs are less accessible to immigrants than they are to native-born citizens. So what I'm not measuring is how generous the programs are in any absolute sense, but all of it is relative.
Speaker: To the extent to which there are distinctions being made between immigrants and native-born. So when those distinctions are such that it's harder for immigrants to qualify them, just for the sake of using clear terms, I use the word exclusion for that. And if less of that happens, I call a regime more inclusionary.
Speaker: So I can talk about some mechanisms by which this might occur if you want a little bit more. So for example, some countries for particular social programs might say you need to have resided in this country for a certain number of years before you can access it.
Speaker: And so that's a mechanism of differentiation by which it's less accessible to immigrants than to native born. Other mechanisms might be that you need a particular type of status that if you have temporary residence status, you won't be eligible. But if you have permanent residence status, you do.
Speaker: Or a country might say you need to have passed certain standards of integration, for example, a language test or some sort of integration exam before you can access that program. So the more of those kinds of mechanisms exist, the more i am calling that regime exclusionary towards immigrants.
Speaker: So we've already dived into the geeky stuff a little bit here. Tell us about your source, the Immigrant Exclusion from Social Programs Index and and the data documents, some of which you've already talked about.
Speaker: Yeah, this is ah sort of like the output of something that I've been working on for a very long time. So... It's a bit of a danger asking me that question in the sense that I might talk for a very long time.
Speaker: Essentially, what it tries to do is to capture mechanisms of differentiation. it uses 32 indicators that capture that kind of differentiation. And i have accumulated that information with the help of research assistants by looking at raw legislation, looking at government documents, looking at the analysis of other scholars who might have studied those countries in detail, follow up interviews with civil servants in case ah we came across contradicting information or there were gaps in the analysis.
Speaker: Let's move a bit to your analysis. How do the vocally anti-immigrant countries you've been citing stack up in terms of their exclusion or inclusion of immigrants in their social programs?
Speaker: Yeah, exactly like you were anticipating in the little pitch at the beginning of the interview. I think one of the most obvious findings is that you see that the places where you hear the most concern from politicians along the lines of, we are treating immigrants unreasonably generously, and we're being sort of naive And the laughingstock of the world, and of course, they take advantage of our programs we because we're being so much more generous. all the So the places like the Netherlands and and Denmark and the United States and the United Kingdom, those are exactly the countries where, or you know Austria, it's an obvious case, especially if you look at the election results from the last election there.
Speaker: Those are exactly the places that score highest on this index of exclusion. So ironically, we're seeing that the arguments are made most strongly where they have the least merit.
Speaker: You also say that the era of social welfare systems becoming more inclusive for immigrants has ended. What what does that look like overall? So what the data set covers is sort of a time period from 1990 2023.
Speaker: to two thousand and twenty three And from 1990 to 2000, you see in almost all countries a steady inclusionary trend of countries deliberately trying to take barriers away that inhibit immigrants from accessing social programs and benefits.
Speaker: But since the 2000s, we see, and especially since the 2010s, you see that that trend has kind of stopped. And that on aggregate, if we just sort of like throw all the countries and all the indicators in one big pile, we basically see stability. So I guess that observation you're referring to just says that we had a trend of general inclusion and that's over. So anyone claiming that we're getting more and more and more and we're doing more and more and more for immigrants,
Speaker: If we want to say this in the most sort of like aggregate possible way, that's just no longer true. And where does Canada fit in, in terms of its trajectory on supporting immigrants?
Speaker: Yeah, so Canada on this index already in the 1990s is one of the more inclusionary cases, and it hasn't changed much over time on that. So I would have to look up the data to know off the top of my head if it ranks fifth or sixth or something, but it's somewhere in that range throughout the time period under consideration.
Speaker: And I think that's also reflected in the lack of purchase this kind of rhetoric has in Canada, right? And so we just don't really see immigrant use of social programs, right?
Speaker: being politicized to the extent that it is elsewhere um in the Canadian context. You know, there's been these episodes like the controversy over the interim federal health program that refugees can make use of in 2012, where There have been occasional parties suggesting a ah wait period for immigrants before they can access provincial welfare programs.
Speaker: But this is all pretty marginal compared to what we see in other countries, and it hasn't really affected policy all that much. To come back to these very vociferous anti-immigrant narratives that immigrants are a drain on our economies, how does that square with the reality of what immigrants contribute to an economy?
Speaker: Yeah, so that's a question that lots of economists have tried to investigate. And it's a pretty difficult question to provide a very robust and comprehensive answer to because the effect on the economy, there's lots of moving parts, right? So there's short-term effects and long-term effects.
Speaker: There are sections of the labor market that might be overpopulated by migrants that native-born citizens don't actually participate at the same levels. And so it's pretty challenging to take all of those into account into a comprehensive calculation.
Speaker: What is undoubtedly true is that in many countries, and even in Canada now as well, even though that didn't used to be the case, is that on average, immigrants, draw on more benefits and pay fewer taxes than native-born citizens.
Speaker: That, of course, is in large part a function of the different socioeconomic status that immigrants tend to have from native-born citizens. in all these same countries where we see those patterns, we also see immigrants struggle more socioeconomically than native-born citizens.
Speaker: And once we take socioeconomic status into account in those kinds of comparisons, those differences disappear altogether. Or actually, more frequently, we find that immigrants are less likely to draw on benefits to which they are entitled to native-born citizens because they might not be familiar with them, because they they might not be accessible to them, which is what my data set tries to capture.
Speaker: Or they might be difficult because of informal barriers such as linguistic challenges or maybe unfriendly civil servants or service providers. So I think the argument that immigrants are picking out countries leech on welfare programs is pretty easy to dispel.
Speaker: i think arguments about is immigration a net benefit or a net cost is really challenging. All the honest scholarly attempts that I've seen to make that calculation tend to conclude that the overall impact is pretty small.
Speaker: And so i think the main thing for me to take from that is that this is very much a political evaluation and not so much an economic calculation. What should people be taking away from the trends that are documented in the index that you've developed?
Speaker: I think what I'm hoping is that people can... have a better understanding of what kind of programs are available to immigrants and how that compares to similar countries. Because this is such a hot-button issue that people are getting so worked up about that there's a lot of misinformation out there. And you can easily be swayed by ah certain narrative in an election campaign that That might make a person who is generally not particularly concerned or mean-spirited about immigrants suddenly thinking, hey, yeah, we're being played for a fool.
Speaker: And so that's the first and foremost thing that I hope that the data set could do to for people who are not maybe using it for doing scholarly analysis themselves.
Speaker: As far as the trends that are taking place are concerned, I think what I also hope to communicate is that the picture is a pretty mixed one and that it's kind of interesting that different social programs seem to be driven by different kinds of dynamics.
Speaker: And so what we see is that In the healthcare sector, there's a lot of healthcare care professionals that are really concerned about immigrants' access to healthcare services and trying to make proactive efforts to take barriers away. And so when we zoom in on healthcare, care we actually see mostly inclusionary developments in lots of countries.
Speaker: But other programs like social assistance, they tend to be much more targeted by those who are worried about immigrants leeching on the system. So that's where we see more and more barriers being thrown up in terms of residence requirements, integration requirements, and status requirements.
Speaker: Well, it's been great talking to you and and a really interesting to hear about this research. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you. I've been speaking with Edward Koning. Edward is associate professor in political science at the University of Guelph.
Speaker: His article called Politicians' Attacks on Immigrants Lack Solid Evidence, New Data Set the Record Straight can be found on theconversation.com.
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