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Legal or illegal? Preferences on immigration
Author(s) -
SolanoGarcía Ángel
Publication year - 2009
Publication title -
international journal of social welfare
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.664
H-Index - 47
eISSN - 1468-2397
pISSN - 1369-6866
DOI - 10.1111/j.1468-2397.2008.00617.x
Subject(s) - amnesty , immigration , illegal immigration , politics , illegal immigrants , competition (biology) , simple (philosophy) , economics , immigration policy , labour economics , political science , political economy , public economics , law , ecology , philosophy , epistemology , biology
The political debate about regularisation programmes for undocumented migrants is a very controversial issue. The main goal of this article is to explain why governments decide to grant amnesties to illegal immigrants as a part of their immigration policy. We propose a simple political competition model in which we first derive the voters' preferences over a menu of regularisation programmes. Labour market conditions make skilled workers more pro‐regularisation than unskilled workers. We find that, in general, the policy implemented at the political equilibrium is a partial amnesty programme, which is what happens in the majority of the countries in this study.