Voting on Mass Immigration Restriction

Francesco Magris and Giuseppe Russo

No 04-17, Documents de recherche from Centre d'Études des Politiques Économiques (EPEE), Université d'Evry Val d'Essonne

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.

Keywords: immigration policy; voting; referendum; Condorcet winner (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F22 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 32 pages
Date: 2004
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Related works:
Journal Article: Voting on Mass Immigration Restriction (2005)
Working Paper: Voting on mass immigration restriction (2004)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eve:wpaper:04-17

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