Jag har tidigare rapporterat om ny svensk forskning som visar att invandring tenderar att minska stödet för välfärdsstaten. Ytterligare en ny studie, ”Preferences for Redistribution, the Size of Government and the Tax System”, denna gång på europeisk nivå, finner samma resultat:

An important channel through which a generous welfare state might affect society as a whole is immigration. The idea that immigrants are attracted to the welfare state because of its benefits, in the form of social security, education, etc., is well known. The economic literature on welfare-induced migration is large and growing, with mixed results for what concerns both the US internal migration and more in general international migration (Razin et al., 2011). … [I]nvestigating if the possibility of welfare-induced immigration reduces support for more governmental redistribution in our sample of post-enlargement European countries is worthwhile. To this purpose, we employ the following ESS question: ”Please tell me to what extent you agree or disagree that social benefits and services in [country] encourage people from other countries to come and live here?”. … The estimates are reported in the last column of Table 4. The coefficient has a negative sign and is statistically highly significant (1% level). Hence, the ”threat” of immigration due to generous social transfers and services leads people to decrease their support for redistributive policies, ceteris paribus. The effect is also sizable in magnitude, as the odds of being more supportive for a large government decrease by 17% for those who believe that redistributive policies encourage immigration compared to the individuals who do not have such view.

Apropå den livliga debatt jag och andra nyligen hade med Tino Sanandaji om konsekvenserna av fri rörlighet kan detta resultat vara högst relevant för dem som befarar att invandring kommer att medföra kraftigt ökad offentlig sektor och högre omfördelning. Det gäller att beakta den politiska reaktionen hos de befintliga väljarna också.

Addendum: Tino har ett blogginlägg i vilket han bemöter argumentationen här.