Just Visiting? The Weakening of Social Protection in a Mobile World

Recent scholarship has become increasingly attentive to the way different welfare states include or exclude newcomers. Much of this literature has focused on the access to benefits granted to immigrants with a permanent status. While this emphasis is understandable, it ignores the growing ranks of individuals who do not settle permanently, either because they are only given temporary status or because they choose to move on. This paper helps to fill this gap by comparing four countries that are very different in the way they treat temporary migrants: Sweden, Canada, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. We find that migrants on a temporary permit are among the most weakly protected in each of these countries, but that the exclusion is more severe in countries where politicians face considerable political pressure to appear tough on immigration and where there are few institutional protections to protect temporary residents from such pressures. These findings highlight both the fragility of social protection in a world of mobility and the importance of firmly entrenched protections of equal treatment.