Legal or Illegal? Preferences on Immigration. Ángel Solano García. ∗ May 2006 Abstract The political debate about the regularization programs for undocu- mented migrants is nowadays a very controversial issue. The main goal of this paper is to explain why governments decide to grant amnesties to ille- gal 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 regularization programs. Labour market conditions make skilled workers more pro-regularizations than unskilled workers. We find that in general the policy implemented at the political equilibrium is a partial amnesty program, which is what happens in the majority of the countries. Keywords: Illegal immigration, regularization program, enforcement pol- icy. JEL Classification: J61, F22, D72 ∗ Departamento de Teoría e Historia Económica. Universidad de Granada. 18011 Granada, Spain. Email: [email protected]. This paper has been written during my doctorate studies at Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. I want to thank Enriqueta Aragonés, Carmen Beviá, and Jordi Massó for their comments and suggestions. Finantial support from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (BEC2002-002130) and Fundación Ramón Areces is acknowledged. 1
Legal or Illegal? Preferences on Immigration
Aug 04, 2023
Welcome message from author
This document is posted to help you gain knowledge. Please leave a comment to let me know what you think about it! Share it to your friends and learn new things together.
Related Documents
