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.
Retirement is emerging as a new frontier of migration governance in temporary migration regimes. In the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where over 90 percent of residents are non-citizens, residency has long been tied to employment, making retirement synonymous with return to the country of origin. Recent golden and retirement visas partially reconfigure this model by allowing residents who meet financial thresholds linked to assets, investments and passive income to remain after retirement. These visas link retirement to efforts to diversify carbon-based economies by expanding real estate, health and eldercare, and financial services. This article conceptualises this process as financialised denizenship, a mode of governance in which non-citizens' long-term security is mediated through their financial capacity rather than their economic and social attachments in places they've lived and worked. Drawing on English-language newspapers in the UAE, the article shows how retirement reforms recast non-citizens' insecurity from a question of citizenship and permanency into one of financial preparedness, producing new hierarchies of inclusion in later life. By extending financialisation to populations excluded from citizenship, the UAE case reveals how temporary migration governance is being reorganised around financial inclusion, while pointing to a global trajectory in which restrictive immigration regimes and financial markets increasingly mediate later-life security.
