Is Selling Immigration Rights Politically Sustainable ?

Bertrand Crettez
Additional contact information
Bertrand Crettez: Université Panthéon-Assas, Paris II

No 2011042, Discussion Papers (REL - Recherches Economiques de Louvain) from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES)

Abstract: This paper relies on Benhabib (1996)’ s immigration model to analyze the political sustainability of selling immigration permits, an idea proposed by Gary Becker. To simplify the analysis, we focus on the effects of immigration flows on input prices. We find that immigration quotas almost always generate the highest capital-labor ratio (and thus the highest wage rate). We also provide an example in which immigration permits generate the lowest value of the capital-labor ratio when permits sales are wasted. Under this last assumption, we show that if the wealth of the median voter is low enough, immigration quotas will be chosen over immigration permits. If the median voter’s wealth is high, then the issue of majority voting will be the system which delivers the lowest capital-labor ratio.

Keywords: immigration quotas; immigration permits; rights to immigrate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 23
Date: 2011-12-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://sites.uclouvain.be/econ/DP/REL/2011042.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:ctl:louvre:2011042

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Discussion Papers (REL - Recherches Economiques de Louvain) from Université catholique de Louvain, Institut de Recherches Economiques et Sociales (IRES) Place Montesquieu 3, 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve (Belgium). Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sebastien SCHILLINGS ().