The economics of international migration: A short history of the debate

a r t i c l e i n f o This paper provides a view of progress over the last quarter century in the economics of international migration. I focus on two long established topics and two that have surged in the last decade. Interest in immigrant and assimilation and in the labour market effects of immigration has been kept going by methodological debates and by the diffusion of empirical work from the United States to the wider world. More recently, the difficult politics of immigration policy has fuelled the research agenda and has given rise to a new literature on the forces that drive immigration policy and on the assessment of its effects. Important also is the growth of interest in the causes and consequences of emigration from developing countries. Most notable has been the revival of interest in the brain drain and the wider consequences of the expanding emigrant diaspora. The last quarter of a century has seen a flowering of research on migration and immigration. A large empirical edifice has been constructed on a relatively slender theoretical base. And while some topics have faded in importance, others have more than made up for it. The original topics include immigrant assimilation and the impact of immigration on the earnings of non-immigrant workers. The debate on these topics has been kept alive by three things. First, although we have learned a lot, some of the key empirical issues are still unresolved and this had led to ongoing refinement of models, methods and data. Second, studies for the United States (and other settler countries) have been transposed to a widening range of other countries and settings. In Europe this has been fostered by the rapid growth of immigration itself. Third, immigration has been, and still is, a hot political topic. In some cases it has led to a polarization of academics into pro-and anti-immigration camps, and this has added heat, and occasionally light, to the academic debate. From the late 1990s, it is possible to discern several new waves in the focus and direction of research. Economists have explored dimensions of migration that were previously neglected or that were the domain of other social sciences. Here I focus on two clusters of activity. The first is immigration policy, which includes the analysis of public opinion and the link with policy formation. It also includes the analysis of the effects …