The impact of welfare benefits on natives' and immigrants' attitudes toward immigration*

•We explore the drivers of natives' and immigrants' attitudes toward immigration.•We directly control for the dependence of migrants and natives on welfare benefits.•We find evidence that labor market competition drives natives' migration attitudes.•Natives' attitudes are influenced by social security claims under benefit adjustment•These effects are weaker for the immigrant sample.

We investigate the effect of the relative welfare dependence of immigrants on attitudes toward further immigration of different groups of the population in a pooled cross-section of 24 European countries for the 2004-2010 period. Explicitly controlling for the dependence of immigrants and natives on welfare benefits we find that in countries with higher take-up rates among immigrants relative to natives pro-immigration attitudes, very robustly, increase more strongly with increasing educational attainment and, slightly less robustly, decline more strongly with the age of natives. Within the group of immigrants, by contrast, the impact of age on pro-immigration attitudes is more favorable with increasing relative benefit take-up of immigrants.