Introduction

Welfare states have faced difficulties in integrating immigrants and in dealing successfully with issues of poverty and deprivation among members of this social group. In fact, this is the case even in those European welfare states that have the most generous welfare regimes. An alternative to the immigrant policies adopted in most welfare states is the categorical immigration policy that characterises the Israeli welfare state. This case is particularly interesting in that immigrants to Israel fare almost as well or better than veteran populations on a number of economic parameters. The goal of this chapter is to explore the contours of the unique immigration policy model adopted in Israel as a contribution to our understanding of the link between immigration and social policies in European welfare states.

Scholars have used a number of different comparative theoretical frameworks in order to examine the link between immigration and social policy. First, research regarding the impact of migration on the welfare state focused on aggregated welfare state contours (Freeman, 1986) as well as the fiscal implications of immigration due to the consumption of services and benefits by immigrants (Castranova et al, 2001; Borjas, 2002; Hanson et al, 2002; Coleman and Rowthorn, 2004; Nannestad, 2007). Second, a historical comparative approach aimed to learn from similarities and differences in immigration policies and immigrants’ social rights in different countries over time (Ongley and Pearson, 1995; Freeman and Birrell, 2001; Fix, 2002; Castles and Miller, 2003). Third, the notion of regime (Esping-Andersen, 1990, 1999; Arts and Gelissen, 2002) has been employed to identify various immigration regimes regarding both the right to migrate (Baldwin-Edwards, 1991; Soysal, 1994) as well as immigrants’ access to welfare state programmes (Dorr and Faist, 1997; Banting, 2000; Bambra, 2005; Hjerm, 2005; Morissens and Sainsbury, 2005; Sainsbury, 2006).

Building on this body of literature, the conceptual framework utilised here is an historical institutional analysis, an approach that has been a dominant force in the theoretical literature on social policy for well over a decade (Starke, 2006). Specifically, the interplay over time between two institutional levels is examined: the right of immigrants to achieve legal residence and the additional conditions that determine access to social rights (Sainsbury, 2006).