Between Solidarity and Diversity: Immigration, Trust, and the Welfare State in Modern
Societies.
“It’s just obvious that you can’t have
free immigration and a welfare state”.
Milton Friedman
Since the mid 1970s a veritable “crisis literature” on the welfare state has
developed heralding its death in multitudinous ways: women joining the workforce,
rising individualism, the “graying” of societies, globalization, declining organizational
capacity of unions, postmaterialism, the decline of the family, deindustrialization,
diminishing class identity, “post-Fordist” production methods, and a whole host of other
explanations. Recently, yet a new element has been identified that is argued to pierce the
heart of the welfare state: rising diversity as a result of increased immigration are said to
inject different religions, races, ethnic groups, and languages into the national polity to
such an extent that the communal sentiments that are said to be necessary for the welfare
state, and for democracy as such, are undermined. Speaking about the conditions in
which democracy can flourish John Stuart Mill (1991, 310) argued that, “Free
institutions are next to impossible in a country made up by different nationalities. Among
a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the
united public opinion, necessary for the working of representative government cannot
exist”.
Alesina, Glaeser and Sacerdote (2001, 1) find that the reason why European
countries are much more generous to the poor is because “racial animosity in the US
Convention