Immigration Quotas and Anti-Immigration Attitudes: An Evaluation of Swiss Migration Policy

Qingyang Lin ()
Additional contact information
Qingyang Lin: IHEID, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, https://www.graduateinstitute.ch/academic-departments/international-economics

No 05-2022, IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies

Abstract: Switzerland implemented an immigration quota system to manage the inflow of immigration between 1970 and 2002. This paper adopts a difference-in-difference strategy taking advantage of subnational variations in the implementation of the quota system to evaluate this migration policy. An instrument variable of antiimmigration attitudes is used to address the potential endogeneity issue. The author finds that the immigration quota system slowed down the growth of foreign population in Switzerland, but had no impact on unemployment. Moreover, such immigration restriction lowered the average skill level of the Swiss population which in turn hurt the productivity of the Swiss economy.

Keywords: Migration; Anti-Immigration Attitudes; Unemployment; Labor Skills (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J21 J24 J61 K37 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 53 pages
Date: 2022-03-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec, nep-his, nep-int, nep-lab, nep-law, nep-mig and nep-ure
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://repec.graduateinstitute.ch/pdfs/Working_papers/HEIDWP05-2022.pdf (application/pdf)

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:gii:giihei:heidwp05-2022

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IHEID Working Papers from Economics Section, The Graduate Institute of International Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dorina Dobre ().