Forced migration and the welfare state: a new perspective on the Progressive’s Dilemma

The impact of ethnic heterogeneity on distributive preferences is still a contested issue, both on theoretical and empirical levels. This paper sheds new light on this problem by analyzing the causality between immigration from countries with a different cultural heritage and the native population’s preference for redistribution using a difference-in-difference approach. We use the so-called European refugee crisis of the years 2015/2016 as a natural experiment to analyze whether the strong influx of asylum seekers weakened native’s support for distributive measures. We use the fact that European regions are exposed to different degrees of migration inflows. Our results show that individuals living in regions that attracted many asylum seekers maintained their initial preference for redistribution. At the same time, those affected to a lesser degree by migration reduced their willingness to support public measures. This result is stable for different specifications. Contrary to the Progressive’s Dilemma hypothesis, we conclude that ethnic heterogeneity per se does not put the European-style welfare state into question.