Profiling at the Canadian Border: An Economist's Viewpoint

Don DeVoretz

No 2536, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: Scrutiny at the Canadian border to heighten security and simultaneously reduce type one (false positives) and type two (false negatives) errors involves a substantial use of resources as well as imposing opportunities costs in terms of time and trade diversion. One maligned strategy to minimize these costs at the border has been group or racial profiling. This essay develops a pedigree system for Canadian border security which simultaneously reduces both type I and II errors while avoiding racial or group profiling.

Keywords: immigrants; borders; security (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J61 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 13 pages
Date: 2006-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-reg
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp2536.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:iza:izadps:dp2536

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().