Intentions to Return of Clandestine Migrants: The Perverse Effect of Illegality on Skills

Nicola Coniglio, Giuseppe De Arcangelis and Laura Serlenga ()

Review of Development Economics, 2009, vol. 13, issue 4, 641-657

Abstract: In this paper we show that highly skilled clandestine migrants are more likely to return home than migrants with low or no skills when illegality causes “skill waste”, i.e. when illegality reduces the rate of return of individual capabilities (i.e. skills and human capital) in the country of destination. In a simple life‐cycle framework, illegality is modeled as a tax on skills that reduces the opportunity cost of returning home particularly for the highly skilled. This proposition is tested on a sample of apprehended immigrants that unlawfully crossed the Italian borders in 2003. The estimation confirms that the intention to return to the home country is more likely for highly skilled illegal immigrants. The empirical results of this paper attenuate the common wisdom on the return decisions of legal migrants, according to which low‐skill individuals are more likely to go back home (mainly because of negative self‐selection).

Date: 2009
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9361.2009.00518.x

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:rdevec:v:13:y:2009:i:4:p:641-657

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1363-6669

Access Statistics for this article

Review of Development Economics is currently edited by E. Kwan Choi

More articles in Review of Development Economics from Wiley Blackwell
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().