Integration Policies and Disadvantage in Receipt of Non-Contributory Benefits among Immigrants in Europe

Márton Medgyesi , TÁRKI Social Research Institute
Maria Giulia Montanari, University of Milano-Bicocca

This research aims to study how integration policies affect migrants’ disadvantage in receipt of non-contributory benefits in EU member states. We expect that the disadvantage in accessing benefits will be greater among newly arrived migrants and that disadvantages will be more important in countries where eligibility of migrants to welfare benefits is more restricted and where the conditionalities attached to permanent residency are more stringent. The analysis uses data from the EU-SILC database (years 2010, 2014 and 2019), covering 19 European countries of destination for both EU and extra-EU migrants. Our results show that migrants who have spent less than five years in the host country are disadvantaged in receipt of non-contributory benefits compared to locals, while the disadvantage seems to be attenuated among migrants who have spent more time in the host country. Results from multilevel models show that disadvantages of newly arrived migrants are smaller in countries where migrants’ eligibility to benefits is less restricted. Interestingly, conditionalities attached to permanent residency also increase disadvantages among the newly arrived migrants. This suggests that in some countries the newly arrived migrants are discouraged from taking up benefits as permanent residency might not be granted for those who have received welfare benefits earlier. Furthermore, the European citizenship matters because the disadvantage of EU migrants as compared to locals is found to disappear after only 5 years of residence, while it takes 15 years in the case of extra EU migrants.

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 Presented in Session P4. Migration, Migrants, and Mobility