Chapter 8 concludes the book with a study of Ukrainian refugees’ migration to Europe after Russia’s brutal attack on their country in February 2022. It shows that publics and elites across Europe’s political spectrum sustained extraordinary levels of support for the refugees’ inclusion, and deploys the book’s analytical framework to explain why. The EU’s Temporary Protection Directive (TPD) provided Ukrainian citizens with immediate and collective protection and full social rights in EU member states. Public opinion data and political parties’ (including populists’) programs are used to account for positive reception of the refugees, based on their multiple sources of deservingness. Relying on UNHCR, OECD, and other studies of refugees’ reported experiences the chapter assesses progress in their social inclusion as well as deficiencies. It considers welfare nationalist grievances that have arisen in Europe and shows that governments have responded to them as ‘normal politics’ rather than by scapegoating the refugees. The chapter ends by comparing European responses to the MENA and Ukrainian refugee migrations, and externalization agreements to address the continuing problem of migration to Europe from MENA and other third countries.

Chapter 3 focuses on political mobilizers of welfare nationalism, mainly popular attitudes toward welfare deservingness, and agents that mobilized anti-immigrant politics. The chapter elaborates on four types of deservingness criteria for migrants; need or vulnerability, ethnic closeness, contributions to receiving states’ economies and to their national security. It argues that societal norms for outsiders’ deservingness have narrowed in both Europe and Russia. Populist parties, anti-immigrant, and Euroskeptic are shown to be key mobilizers of welfare nationalism, abetted by anti-immigrant mass media. The chapter tracks one major populist party each in Britain, Germany, Italy, Sweden, and Poland, showing how that party gained vote share and national influence by opposing the CEE and MENA migrations. Using party programs and electoral outcomes, it shows how populists reinforced and amplified welfare nationalist grievances in societies, channeling them into electoral success and pressures for exclusionary migration policies. In authoritarian Russia, popular grievances against migrants are shown to be similar to grievances in Europe, but welfare nationalism was mobilized by regional elites, governors, and mayors. The chapter draws on arguments about authoritarian elites’ motivations to respond to popular grievances in order to explain how sub-national leaders used anti-immigrant mobilization for political advantage in Russia’s hybrid regime.

Chapter 4 focuses on labor migration from Central Asia to Russia as the first exclusionary migration cycle. Growing migration after 2000 made Russia one of the world’s major migrant-receiving states. The chapter explains why Putin retained a visa-free regime with the much poorer former Soviet states of CA, allowing millions of their citizens free entry to Russia, where most stayed and worked with undocumented status. As the numbers of the ethnically distant Muslim migrants rose, welfare nationalist grievances emerged in the cities and regions where migrants were concentrated. Citing public opinion surveys, speeches by mayors and governors, election and party platforms, and mass media, the chapter shows how politicians framed and used welfare nationalist discourses to placate citizens and scapegoat migrants for declines in popular welfare. It highlights the role of sub-national officials in mobilizing anti-immigrant politics and channeling pressures for exclusionary policies to Putin. These pressures produced legislative and normative changes that progressively excluded migrant families from social sectors and subjected workers to increasing abuses, including deportations and other forms of exclusion. A sub-set of migrants who contributed to Russia’s national security were treated as more deserving.

Chapter 6 looks at political responses to the MENA migration to Europe from 2011, the most harshly exclusionary case in my study. The migration mixed asylum seekers fleeing wars in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan, with labor migrants from other MENA states. The chapter tracks Europe’s progression from initially cautious receptiveness of asylum seekers to policies of exclusion of MENA migrants from the continent. It shows that the growing numbers, migrant “mix,” and terrorist attacks by (mostly non-migrant) Islamic extremists in Europe combined to undermine need-based deservingness, empower populist parties and feed xenophobic media. The chapter focuses on the EU’s turn to militarized securitization of its land and sea borders and ‘externalization of borders’ to Turkey and Libya, policies that ended the migration surge by indiscriminate physical exclusion of migrants and asylum seekers. Case studies show the varied effects of and responses to the migration in the five European cases and in Russia, which received much smaller numbers. Responses to the MENA migration brought international migration to the core of Europe’s politics, entrenched populist parties, and showed the failure of the Geneva Convention asylum system in the 21st century.

Chapter 5 turns to westward labor migration from the EU’s newly acceded Central and East European (CEE) states to the EU15 from 2004. Despite the EU’s promise full social inclusion, the migration followed an exclusionary cycle. Focusing on Britain, the chapter shows how migrants’ EU-mandated free entry and social rights provoked a welfare nationalist backlash that was amplified by the tabloid press and reflected in opinion polls and in growing support for the populist, anti-immigrant United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP). Relying on government documents, the chapter shows how Britain’s social security bureaucracy progressively rescinded CEE labor migrants’ social rights while the government adopted exclusionary migration reforms, culminating in the 2016 Brexit vote that ended CEE migrants’ entry rights. The Brexit Settlement Scheme preserved residence rights for some on ethnically and economically discriminatory bases. Comparative case studies of CEE migration to Germany, Sweden, and Italy show that each followed the British model ‘part of the way,’ adopting more selective exclusionary policies that discriminated the poorer, younger and less-skilled. The conclusion explains why the EU failed in the effort to extend its egalitarian, inclusionary, European citizenship project eastward.

Chapter 1 lays out the book’s argument about the rise and sources of welfare nationalism. It explains the significance of the study in focusing on migration issues that are major sources of contemporary political and humanitarian crises and shows ‘how we got here’ – how these crises have built since the 1990s in Europe and Russia. The chapter explains the book’s key concepts: welfare nationalism, exclusion and inclusion, and populism, and sets the study within the literature on international migration and welfare. It focuses on the key role of ethnicity and the importance of political elites and mass media in influencing responses to migration and identifies contrasting cycles: Exclusionary migrations involve a “vicious cycle” of hostile public opinion toward more-or-less ethnically distant migrants that is reinforced and exploited by politicians for enhanced influence, amplified by mass media, and produces policies of exclusion. By contrast, inclusionary migrations involve a “virtuous cycle” of relatively receptive public opinion toward ethnically close migrants, high-level political support, elites’ management of nationals’ grievances, and positive treatment in mass media, producing policies of inclusion. The conclusion provides an overview of the book’s structure and a summary of each chapter.