Welfare deservingness and immigration status: evidence from a survey experiment in Brazil

Rapidly rising international migration to the Global South has sparked debates about whether immigrants are ‘deserving’ of social benefits. While previous research on the Global North showed that immigrants are viewed as less deserving than non-immigrants, we know less about how these exclusionary attitudes vary across policy type and immigration status. This article examines how policies and legal status shape welfare deservingness. We argue that exclusionary attitudes are more pronounced for targeted benefits than for universal ones, especially for unauthorised immigrants. We test these expectations using an original survey experiment in Brazil that randomises whether immigrants are described as authorised or unauthorised. First, we observe that support is substantially lower for targeted benefits such as cash transfers than for universal services like public healthcare. Second, our experimental findings show that unauthorised immigrants face a significant penalty across both policies. Importantly, the penalty associated with legal status is significantly larger for targeted benefits. These findings extend research on welfare deservingness and highlight how policy type and legal status shape public boundaries of inclusion towards immigrants. As humanitarian crises intensify and migration to the Global South grows, understanding public views is increasingly important as they can influence policy and immigrants’ well-being.