De Facto Openness to Immigration

Ljubica Nedelkoska (), Diego A. Martin, Alexia Lochmann (), Dany Bahar, Ricardo Hausmann and Muhammed A. Yildirim
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Ljubica Nedelkoska: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Diego A. Martin: Harvard's Growth Lab
Alexia Lochmann: Center for International Development at Harvard University
Muhammed A. Yildirim: Center for International Development at Harvard University

No 245, Growth Lab Working Papers from Harvard's Growth Lab

Abstract: Various factors influence why some countries are more open to immigration than others. Policy is only one of them. We design country-specifc measures of openness to immigration that aim to capture de facto levels of openness to immigration, complementing existing de jure measures of immigration, based on enacted immigration laws and policy measures. We estimate these for 148 countries and three years (2000, 2010, and 2020). For a subset of countries, we also distinguish between openness towards tertiary-educated migrants and less than tertiary-educated migrants. Using the measures, we show that most places in the World today are closed to immigration, and a few regions are very open. The World became more open in the first decade of the millennium, an opening mainly driven by the Western World and the Gulf countries. Moreover, we show that other factors equal, countries that increased their openness to immigration, reduced their old-age dependency ratios, and experienced slower real wage growth, arguably a sign of relaxing labor and skill shortages.

Keywords: Openness to immigration; measurement; aging; wages (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 J15 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025-02
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:glh:wpfacu:245

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