Since the 1990s, narratives about immigrants engaging in "benefit tourism” have been popular despite mixed evidence. In this study examining 10 years of administrative records in Switzerland, researchers from IPL Zurich found little evidence that immigrants who relocated substantially increased their welfare income. They also found that municipalities that increase benefits do not attract more immigrants, countering arguments often leveraged by politicians to justify cuts to social assistance programs.
The United States has seen a rise in political rhetoric and federal policy based on the “welfare magnet” idea that immigrants pose a fiscal challenge to social safety net programs, especially publicly funded health coverage. But is there any evidence of this? IPL studied the state-by-state expansion of Medicaid to include recently arrived immigrants, and the results suggest that immigrants don’t strategically move to other states to claim these benefits.
When California moved to make driver’s licenses available to unauthorized residents, critics raised an outcry: the law, they said, would flood the roads with inexperienced, uninsured drivers and lead to more accidents. Two years and more than 800,000 licenses later, those fears are largely unfounded, IPL researchers found. Our study also revealed a 10 percent decrease in the rate of hit-and-run accidents in the law’s first year, which adds up to savings of $3.5 million in out-of-pocket expenses for California drivers.
