The price of sharing: support for universal and equal access to health care in diversifying neighborhoods

Is immigration undermining mass support for the welfare state? While an increase in the number of immigrants might not impact the willingness to fund existing universal programmes such as health care, it can undermine the normative commitment to universal and equal access to care. These norms are key to the support public health care systems usually command. Using British panel data matched to contextual data from the 1991 and 2001 censuses, we show that individuals who experience an increase in the share of foreign born in their neighborhood become less likely to support universal access to health care.