Title:	Migration States and Welfare States: Why Is America Different from Europe?
Authors:	Assaf Razin
Keywords:	Migration States
Issue Date:	2014
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan
Description:	In the era of the welfare state, it has become impossible to envisage a world of free migration. A welfare state is a magnet for migrants, especially the low-skilled, the poor, and the old. The birth of the welfare state was in Bismarck, Germany, in the late nineteenth century. Then in the twentieth century, following two world wars, most of the European countries – those that later were to form the European Union, developed their own model of the welfare state. The reconstruction of continental Europe (and of Germany and France in particular,) had exhausted the native-born labor force. So those countries encouraged guest workers to come from labor-rich countries in southern Europe, Turkey and North Africa, only to face the practical problems involved in developing an effective migration policy. Exceptionally, France had from the beginning a legal immigration policy that allowed the settlement of immigrant workers and their families from its colonies in North Africa. Germany, on the other hand, endeavored to maintain strict rotation policies aimed at not allowing the guest workers to settle in Germany. The US ceased freely admitting migrants after World War I, at the time when it also started to gradually develop welfare state systems (such as federal income tax, old age pension, and so on). These developed into the great social institutions of the 1960s (such as Medicare), and in the early twenty-first century have culminated in the affordable care legislation known as ObamaCare. We aim at a broader readership than that of the specialized academic economist, who typically publish his or her scientific work in rigorously technical journals. We hope that we will not sacrifice any quality by writing for a more general audience, even though in so doing we will not explore the technical details so deeply, nor provide such rigorous analysis. This work, which we co-authored over the last decade and a half, synthesizes our thinking on the key issues. Those analytical and empirical works are each small pieces of a more general puzzle, and in our work the loss of technical analysis will, we hope, be compensated by the bigger picture becoming clearly visible.
URI:	http://10.6.20.12:80/handle/123456789/53036
ISBN:	978-1-349-49582-5
Appears in Collections:	Population Studies

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