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2017 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

12. International Integration with Heterogeneous Immigration Policies

Author : Kenji Kondoh

Published in: The Economics of International Immigration

Publisher: Springer Singapore

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Abstract

Migration flows are a powerful source of economic and social change in both destination and origin countries. The regulation of international migration flows is a very sensitive policy area which is almost exclusively in the hands of domestic policymakers with little room left for multilateral policymaking. Even in the European Union, an area where the process of economic and social integration is pervasive and intense, the harmonization of immigration policies is confined to the establishment of uniform rules on specific issues (such as asylum seeker regulations) or to the definition of broad principles.

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previous chapter Renewable Resources, Environmental Pollution, and International Migration

next chapter Emigration, Immigration, and Skill Formation: The Case of a Midstream Country

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The recent large increase in migration flows from the North-African coast toward Italy as a consequence of the wave of political unrests in sending areas shows the difficulties in enforcing common rules and in coordinating external border control within the European Union.

The EU directive 2009/50/EC introduced the so-called European Blue Card for facilitating the admission of qualified third-country nationals and their families. The directive has been effectively transposed into national legislations in only a few countries so far.

The Austrian point-based system will replace the former immigration quota system and will be effective from July 2011. These policies are aimed at attracting highly skilled individuals and employees in shortage occupations.

In Austria for instance, the National Integration Plan introduced in 2009 established that a basic knowledge of German language prior to arrival is required for low-educated family migrants. A similar regulation was adopted by France in 2008: as a condition for family reunification, a French language and culture test has to be passed while applicants are still in the country of origin. The “language test” is in some cases required in order to obtain long-term residence permit (like in Italy and Denmark). The UK Government has recently passed a new regulation which imposes an English language test also for partners of migrants. In point-based systems, language abilities are either compulsory (United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand) or given a large weight in the assessment process (Denmark, Netherland, Canada).

Numerical limits to immigration, equivalent to explicit quotas, might be imposed also indirectly by modifying acceptance procedures.

Our results do not depend on the setting of an optima quota. Similar results can be obtained by allowing free immigration; in this simple alternative setting, hosting countries would not maximize the welfare effects of immigration flows.

In this simple model, we do not consider welfare effects via changes in final goods prices.

Japan is an emblematic example of the dominance of nonmarket forces in the determination of immigration policy. In fact, it is well known also to policymakers that an increase in immigration would be economically highly beneficial in a country with a rapidly shrinking working-age population. The highly restrictive stance of Japanese immigration policy is due to the perceived potential social consequences of immigration in a rather homogenous society.

In their recent paper on immigration attitudes, Card et al. (2012) define this noneconomic set of immigration policy determinants as “compositional amenities,” i.e., changes in utility derived in social interactions (in the neighborhood, at school, or at the workplace) that are directly related to immigration.

In the extreme case where natives do not experience negative social consequences from migration, i.e., \( h\left({Q}_j\right)=0 \), the welfare function is equivalent to the national income; hence, countries will maximize the economic benefits from migration only.

In our multiple destination framework, the skills content of immigration in one country is also affected by the selectivity of immigration policy in the alternative destination, i.e., a policy externality exists and affects the welfare effects of immigration.

In the current framework of the model, we restrict the analysis to a case where the required destination-specific human capital is acquired only before migration; to keep the model simple, we abstract without loss of generality from the possibility of an improvement in individuals’ abilities during the (illegal or legal) migration spell in the host country.

Each generation is an exact replica of the previous one such that the distribution of skill formation within the population is constant over time. As the population in the sending country, N _C, is by assumption sufficiently large, we may treat every age group as a continuum of individuals with different abilities.

Note that even if the individual probability of being caught is increasing with L ₂, the detection rate, i.e., the share of illegal migrants that is caught over total illegal migrants, can fall if the denominator increases at a higher rate.

From Eq. 12.3, we know that an increase in the entry requirements \( \overline{Q} \) increases the migration age τ for all i and thus reduces L ₁.

The immigration quota is indirectly set by the government using an (equivalent) entry visa. It is widely known that in the fashion of the MacDougall model, compared with autarky, free factor mobility benefits both host and source countries. But focusing only on the national income or welfare of the host country, an optimal tax on the income of immigrants is welfare improving and better than the free immigration case.

Note that in equilibrium these three alternative wages are identical.

This condition is obtained by confronting the average migrant skills in the two policy pairs sq and qq from Table 12.2, i.e., \( \frac{\left(1+{\underline{i}}_A\right){L}_1^A+{\underline{i}}_A{L}_2^A}{2\left({L}_1^A+{L}_2^A\right)}>\frac{1}{2}\Rightarrow {\underline{i}}_A>\frac{L_2^A}{L_1^A+{L}_2^A} \).

As mentioned above, we focus our attention on the interesting—and also probably more realistic—case of host countries implementing heterogeneous immigration policies. As argued in our introductory section, governments have different attitudes toward immigration flows and hence implement alternative policy regimes. We acknowledge that other policy settings can be analyzed employing the same modeling framework (for instance, a case where both countries adopt a skill-selective immigration policy); we leave this analysis to future work.

Now (12.7) can also be rewritten in \( -1<\frac{\partial {L}_2}{\partial {L}_1}=-\frac{\frac{a}{3}\left(1-\rho \right)}{\frac{a}{3}\left(1-\rho \right)+{\rho}^{\prime}\left({w}_A^M-{w}_C^M\right)}<0 \).

See the Appendix for detailed calculation on the sign of \( \frac{d\left({L}_1+{L}_2\right)}{d{L}_A}-\frac{d\left({L}_1+{L}_2\right)}{d{L}_B} \).

Bertoli, S., Brucker, H., Facchini, G., Mayda, A. M., & Peri, G. (2009). The battle for brains: How to attract talent. Report for the Fondazione Rodolfo De Benedetti, Milano, www.frdb.org.

Bruecker, H., & Schroder, P. J. H. (2011). Migration regulation contagion. European Union Politics, 12, 315–335. CrossRef

Card, D., Dustmann, C., & Preston, I. (2012). Immigration, wages and compositional amenities. Journal of the European Economic Association, 10, 78–119.CrossRef

Coniglio, N. D., & Kondoh, K. (2015). International integration with heterogeneous immigration policies. International Economics, 142, 15–31.CrossRef

Djajić, S. (1989). Skills and the pattern of migration: The role of qualitative and quantitative restrictions on international labor mobility. International Economic Review, 30, 795–809.CrossRef

Kondoh, K. (2000). Legal migration and illegal migration: The effectiveness of qualitative and quantitative restriction policies. Journal of International Trade and Economic Development, 9, 227–245.CrossRef

MacDougall, G. D. A. (1960). The benefits and costs of private investment from abroad: A theoretical approach. Economic Record, 36, 13–35.CrossRef

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Title: International Integration with Heterogeneous Immigration Policies
Author: Kenji Kondoh
Publisher: Springer Singapore
Book: The Economics of International Immigration
Print ISBN: 978-981-10-0091-1

Electronic ISBN: 978-981-10-0092-8

Copyright Year: 2017
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0092-8_12

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