About the project

The primary objective of the research project is to examine how labor migration affects various aspects of the welfare state.

Secondary objectives:

Conducting our own web-based surveys in collaboration with Norstat and the Norwegian Citizen Panel (UiB) to investigate how intra-EU immigration affects attitudes towards the welfare state in Norway.

Using existing, transnational datasets to examine welfare chauvinism and the extent to which different types of immigration (e.g. intra-EU immigration/asylum immigration) can cause welfare chauvinism/reduced support for welfare programs.

Employing survey experiments to gain a better understanding of the political support for different welfare state retrenchment strategies (stricter eligibility requirements/ reduced level of benefits/ reduced maximum duration of benefits)

Conducting a wide-ranging economic experiment on people's attitudes towards what we call "false positives" and "false negatives" in distributive choices.  A false positive is to provide social security to one who does not "deserve" it, while a false negative is not to provide social security to one who does "deserve" it.

We aim to conduct in-depth interview with at least 70 Polish labor immigrants in Norway, focusing on their experiences in two arenas: work place and social life. A particular focus will be to gain a better understanding of their experiences with tax evasion and why some of them work undeclared.

The 2004 enlargement of the European Union, with the ensuing movements of ‘Accession 8’ migrants, has and will continue to have a profound impact on migration patterns in Norway. Both the demographic and geographic characteristics of immigrants are shifting, and much of the media attention directed towards the traditional “asylum seekers” now turns towards the new East European migrants. The aim of the research project “Labor migration and the moral sustainability of the Norwegian welfare state” is to examine the effect of this new immigration on the welfare state. Labor immigration is, in contrast to other kinds of migration, very often a more temporal phenomenon, affected by the situation in the mother country and the country in demand of labor. Taking this temporality into account we critically examine the effects that labor migration has on social preferences. Furthermore, we study polish labor immigrants working in Norway, examining, amongst other, how integrated they are in the Norwegian society and also aspects related to their labor life, such as why some of them engage in tax evasion.