Voting on mass immigration restriction

Francesco Magris and Giuseppe Russo ()

DELTA Working Papers from DELTA (Ecole normale supérieure)

Abstract: We study how immigration policies are determined under voting in a model where immigration redistributes income from wages to capital, migration decisions are endogenous, there exist border enforcement costs and preference for home-country consumption. We model the migration policy as a pure entry rationing rather than a necessarily porous screening system. Unlike the existing results of polarization, our findings show that preferences about frontier closure are distributed on a continuum going from total closure to total openness. Thus, the Condorcet winning immigration policy may well be an interior solution. Our results fit the real-life observation that both perfect closure and perfect openness are rare events. We also study the case of a referendum over two alternative policies and show that its outcome depends upon the location of the median voter with respect to the individual indifferent between the two alternatives.

New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-pol and nep-reg
Date: 2004
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Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:del:abcdef:2004-27

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