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Migrants living in Europe constitute over half of the world's international migrants and are at higher risk of poor mental health than non-migrants, yet also face more barriers in accessing and engaging with services. Furthermore, the quality of care received is shaped by the experiences and attitudes of health professionals. The aim of this review was to identify professionals' attitudes towards migrants receiving mental healthcare and their perceptions of barriers and facilitators to service provision. Four electronic databases were searched, and 23 studies met the inclusion criteria. Using thematic synthesis, we identified three themes: 1) the management of multifaceted and complex challenges associated with the migrant status; 2) professionals' emotional responses to working with migrants; and 3) delivering care in the context of cultural difference. Professionals employed multiple strategies to overcome challenges in providing care yet attitudes towards this patient group were polarized. Professionals described mental health issues as being inseparable from material and social disadvantage, highlighting a need for effective collaboration between health services and voluntary organizations, and partnerships with migrant communities. Specialist supervision, reflective practice, increased training for professionals, and the adoption of a person-centered approach are also needed to overcome the current challenges in meeting migrants' needs. The challenges experienced by health professionals in attempting to meet migrant needs reflect frustrations in being part of a system with insufficient resources and without universal access to care that effectively stigmatizes the migrant status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses innovative democratic forums carried out in Germany, Norway, and the United Kingdom to examine people's ideas about welfare-state priorities and future prospects. We use a moral economy framework in the context of regime differences and the move towards neo-liberalism across Europe. Broadly speaking, attitudes reflect regime differences, with distinctive emphasis on reciprocity and the value of work in Germany, inclusion and equality in Norway, and individual responsibility and the work-ethic in the UK. Neo-liberal market-centred ideas appear to have made little headway in regard to popular attitudes, except in the already liberal-leaning UK. There is also a striking assumption by UK participants that welfare is threatened externally by immigrants who take jobs from established workers and internally by the work-shy who undermine the work-ethic. A key role of the welfare state is repressive rather than enabling: to protect against threats to well-being rather than provide benefits for citizens. UK participants also anticipate major decline in state provision. In all three countries there is strong support for continuing and expanding social investment policies, but for different reasons: to enable contribution in Germany, to promote equality and mobility in Norway, and to facilitate self-responsibility in the UK. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Welfare chauvinism is largely understood as the view that the benefits of the welfare state should primarily be given to the native population, and not shared with the immigrant populations. Using a multilevel approach, we analyse welfare chauvinism in Europe and test to see how different contextual and macro-economic conditions may influence welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe, with a particular focus on different nuances of unemployment. We also test how individuals' subjective perceptions of the economic development in their society may influence welfare chauvinism in Europe. The analysis finds that welfare chauvinistic attitudes have increased in strength in Central-Eastern European welfare states, whereas the most exclusionary form of welfare chauvinism is near non-existent in the Nordic welfare regimes. We further find that it is the subjective perceptions of the macro-economic conditions and the strength of far-right populism, rather than the actual objective reality of a society's economic situation that drives welfare chauvinistic attitudes in Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'welfare chauvinism' has achieved a certain currency in social science research and is used widely. Yet, the concept is not without its critics, who claim that welfare chauvinism is 'loaded' or 'ambiguous'. This article reviews empirical studies of welfare chauvinism, from the 1990s to the present day, drawing primarily from party politics and attitudes research. We identify differences in how the concept is used, defined, operationalized and measured. We emphasize the importance of a unified language, operationalization and measurement, and identify promising directions for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past years, we have seen a rise in political mobilisations in EUrope and elsewhere, by and in solidarity with migrant newcomers. This article focuses on specific examples of what we conceptualise as transversal solidarities by and with migrants, and rooted in the city, the focus of this special issue. The examples we explore in this article include: Trampoline House, a civil society organisation which provides a home to migrant newcomers in Copenhagen; Queer Base, an activist organisation in Vienna providing support for LGBTIQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer) migrants; and finally, the Palermo Charter Process, a coalition of diverse groups seeking to create open harbours and 'corridors of solidarity', from the Mediterranean to cities throughout EUrope. While these examples are situated in and across different urban spaces, they share a common grounding in building solidarity through spaces of encounters related to ideas of home, community, and harbour. By exploring these distinct solidarity initiatives in tandem, we examine, on the one hand, how the production of spaces of encounters is linked to building transversal solidarities and, on the other, how transversal solidarities also connect different spaces of solidarity across different political scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide a systematic assessment of various methods to position political parties on immigration, a policy domain that does not necessarily overlap with left–right and is characterized by varying salience and issue complexity. Manual and automated coding methods drawing on 283 party manifestos are compared – manual sentence-by-sentence coding using a conventional codebook, manual coding using checklists, automated coding using Wordscores, Wordfish and keywords. We also use expert surveys and the Comparative Manifesto Project (CMP), covering the main parties in Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom, between 1993 and 2013. We find high levels of consistency between expert positioning, manual sentence-by-sentence coding and manual checklist coding and poor or inconsistent results with the CMP, Wordscores, Wordfish and the dictionary approach. An often-neglected method – manual coding using checklists – offers resource efficiency with no loss in validity or reliability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]