Positioning of migrants within capitalist welfare societies

Abstract

The final construction phase of European multi-modal capitalist welfare societies after World War II presupposed a homogeneous national population with the ‘usual’ stratifications in terms of class, gender, education levels and qualifications. In the meantime, migrants have come to constitute a significant percentage of the European population, some 10–20 per cent according to the classifications used to identify migrant populations. Migrant populations tend to have, to some extent, particular life courses and sometimes divergent forms of economic and political participation. As a result, the situation of migrant populations in Europe has been widely discussed over the past two decades. However, approaching this issue empirically, and considering the nature of life courses in the migrant population and exploring how migrants fit in European capitalist welfare societies, is rather complex. There are a number of reasons for this, such as the diversity of migrant populations, for example, origin and links with the present country of residence, the numerous different ways migrant populations can be classified with, as a result, a lack of reliable comparable data, and the difficulty of finding reliable surveys of how migrant populations contribute to and use welfare arrangements.KeywordsLabour MarketImmigrant WomanImmigrant PopulationMigrant PopulationMigrant GroupThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.