Voting over Selective Immigration Policies with Immigration Aversion

Giuseppe Russo

CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy

Abstract: Selective immigration policies set lower barriers to entry for skilled workers. However, simple economic intuition suggests that skilled majorities should welcome unskilled immigrants and protect skilled natives. This paper studies the voting over a selective policy in a two-country, three-factor model with skilled and unskilled labor, endogenous migration decisions, costly border enforcement and aversion to immigration. Results show that heterogeneity in capital distribution forces skilled voters to form a coalition with unskilled voters, who become pivotal. The voting outcome is therefore biased towards the preferences of the latter, and consists in a selective protectionism. Finally, immigration aversion helps to explain why skilled majorities do not bring down entry barriers against unskilled workers.

Keywords: selective immigration policies; multidimensional voting; cultural preferences; Condorcet winner (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F22 J18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011-07-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm, nep-mig and nep-pol
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Published in Economics of Governance, 2011, vol. 4, pp. 300-326

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp289.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Voting over selective immigration policies with immigration aversion (2011)
Working Paper: Voting over Selective Immigration Policies with Immigration Aversion (2008)
Working Paper: Voting over Selective Immigration Policies with Immigration Aversion (2008)
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:sef:csefwp:289

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CSEF Working Papers from Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dr. Maria Carannante ().