Poor health and hostility toward immigrants?

Thrilled to see our new paper out now in Comparative Political Studies: ‘They Take Our Healthcare’: Health and Attitudes towards Immigration in Europe.

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Why are people in poor health more hostile toward immigrants? Our study pushes the debate beyond income or cultural backlash. We introduce health as a core political variable, shaping perceptions of threat, solidarity, and belonging.

I'm particularly happy to see this paper published in such a top journal because it brings together the two main lines of my research: the political economy of health and populism. Together with Anne-Marie Jeannet and David Stuckler, we show that bad health doesn’t just make life harder, it also erodes trust in others and in the political system, fueling fears that immigrants are “draining” public services.

Using data from over 220,000 respondents across 30 European countries (ESS 2002–2023), we trace how ill health translates into anti-immigrant sentiment. Our models combine fixed effects, structural equation modeling to explore mediation, and propensity score matching to reduce selection bias.

We identify three key causal pathways: fear that immigrants overuse services, diminished interpersonal trust, and declining faith in political institutions. These effects are strongest where people perceive more ethnic minorities around them, amplifying the sense of competition for health resources.

We argue that deeper, embodied forms of suffering, especially poor health, are a powerful engine of exclusionary attitudes. When the safety net frays, people turn inward, and nativist narratives find fertile ground. Even though immigrants contribute more to health systems than they take out, their high visibility in emergency rooms and GP services contributes to the impression of overuse, especially among people in poor health who are worried about losing access to quality health services.

Bottom line: When people feel sick, they also feel scared. And scared people make easy targets for politicians looking to blame outsiders. If we want to fight xenophobia, we need to take public health, and the public’s trust seriously.

Cite as:

Scheiring, Gábor, Jeannet, Anne-Marie, and Stuckler, David (2025), ‘‘They Take Our Healthcare:’ Health and Attitudes Towards Immigration in Europe,’ Comparative Political Studies, Advance Access (Published on May/11/2025). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00104140251342