The focus is placed on categorizing state residents in two extremes: the "nourishing" and "debilitating" and the contradiction between them in the competition for the society's scarce resources.
[1][2][3] The term welfare chauvinism was first used in social science in the 1990 paper "Structural changes and new cleavages: The progress parties in Denmark and Norway" by Jørgen Goul Andersen and Tor Bjørklund.
The nourishing group consists of those who are a part of society's welfare and the country's prosperity: community builders; "the people"; the ordinary honest working man.
[7] The same principle of argument is, according to the academics Peer Scheepers, Mérove Gijsberts and Marcel Coenders, transferred to the labor market, where the competition for jobs is made out to be an ethnic conflict between immigrants and the native population.
In times of high unemployment this rhetorical coupling amplifies and enhances the legitimacy of the welfare chauvinist and other xenophobic arguments.