Transnational terrorism and restrictive immigration policies

Marc Helbling and Daniel Meierrieks

EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters, 2020, vol. 57, issue 4, 564-580

Abstract: We investigate the relationship between transnational terrorism and the restrictiveness of immigration policies. We argue that transnational terrorism may create incentives for governments to implement more restrictive migration policies. First, more restrictive policies may make terrorism a more costly endeavor, discouraging future terrorist activity. Second, voters may hold the government accountable for the increased insecurity and economic instability terrorism produces; more restrictive migration policies may signal political resolve and meet public demand for security-providing policies, consequently reducing the government’s chances of electoral defeat. We provide an empirical analysis of the effect of transnational terrorism on migration policy restrictiveness for a sample of 30 OECD countries between 1980 and 2010. We find that a greater exposure to transnational terrorism is associated with stricter migration controls, but not stricter migration regulations regarding eligibility criteria and conditions. This finding is robust to different model specifications, estimation methods, operationalizations of terrorism, and instrumental-variable approaches. It points to the securitization of immigration, providing partial support for the notion that transnational terrorism incentivizes migration policy change towards greater restrictiveness. However, the policy response appears to be surgical (affecting only migration controls) rather than sweeping (and thus not influencing broader migration regulations) for the countries in our sample.

Keywords: immigration; immigration policy; securitization; transnational terrorism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/222247/1/F ... al-terrorism-and.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Transnational terrorism and restrictive immigration policies (2020)
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:zbw:espost:222247

DOI: 10.1177/0022343319897105

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in EconStor Open Access Articles and Book Chapters from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().