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By Bryan Caplan
People normally assume that immigration will expand the welfare state. The lazy version says (a) immigrants are net beneficiaries of the welfare state, and (b) people vote their self-interest. The better version says that immigrants' countries of origins favor more redistribution than natives - and immigrants bring their political culture with them. Both stories, however, ignore the effect of immigration on natives' support for the welfare state.  Researchers - most of whom look kindly upon both immigration and the welfare state...
In recent years, Thomas Sowell has been a staunch advocate of stricter immigration policies. Which is ironic, because this passage from his Compassion Versus Guilt has stuck with me for thirty years: When I travel through California's vast agricultural areas, the people I see working...
Related to your second point (but assuming rationality rather than mood affiliation), Condorcet's principle (I'll call it that since it's not really a paradox) could lead to the same thing. In fact, there could be a positive feedback loop, by which opposition to immigration on the right rooted in immigrants' tendency to vote Democratic leads more immigrants to vote Democratic whatever their opinions on welfare, which in turn enables Democrats to pursue more welfare programs, bringing us full circle to Republicans seeing this as a reason to further oppose immigration. I'm inclined to posit a general theorem: whenever you have two mutually exclusive groups that have, on average, differing interests or values, even if the difference is politically irrelevant at the starting point, the state in which each group is proportionally represented in each political party/camp is an unstable equilibrium. Things will always tend, over time, toward a state where one group predominantly votes for one party and the other group for the other party.
Mark Z , October 18, 8:13 pm.