The rhetoric of closed borders: Quotas, lax enforcement and illegal immigration
نویسندگان
چکیده
Governments do not always enforce their laws, even when they have the means of doing so, and lax enforcement is common in domain immigration policy. To explain this paradox we develop a political agency model where gains from migration are unevenly distributed, an elected government chooses both quotas enforcement. We show that distributional concerns can perverse effects on policy since utilitarian may set quota to appease electorate, but then strategically under-invest its Under-investment more likely, larger preference gap between median average voter, higher likelihood populist challenger gaining office. Our analysis also indicates redistributive taxation reducing share cost borne by voter exacerbates problem, whereas compensatory tax rebate financed through profits alleviates conflict interest, thus illegal immigration.
منابع مشابه
The Rhetoric of Closed Borders : Quotas , Lax Enforcement and Illegal Immigration
In 2008, approximately 12 million immigrants lived illegally in the United States, and large numbers of undocumented foreigners resided also in other advanced destination countries. Hence, attempts at controlling immigration flows seem to often fail. If governments are not enforcing their “official” immigration policy, why do they set such a policy in the first place? The purpose of this paper ...
متن کاملThe rhetoric of closed borders : quotas , lax enforcement and illegal migration ∗
Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty about the supply of migrants, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the majority of his electorate, or...
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In the 1990s, while there was a large decline in property-related crime along the U.S.Mexico border, violent crime rates began to converge to the national average. At the same time, legal and illegal immigration from Mexico surged and border enforcement rose to unprecedented levels. In this paper, we investigate the relationship between border county crime rates, immigration and enforcement sin...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Journal of International Economics
سال: 2021
ISSN: ['0022-1996', '1873-0353']
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jinteco.2020.103415