Fiscal Revenues and Commitment in Immigration Amnesties

Francesco Magris and Giuseppe Russo

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

Abstract: Reasons to grant immigration amnesties include the intention to reduce the weight of the informal sector and the attempt to identify employers of undocumented workers. However, it is incontestable that potential fiscal gains are important: tax revenues are crucial in all kinds of amnesties. Nevertheless, over the last 30 years 24% of applications have been rejected. It is still unexplained why governments accept this loss of fiscal base. We argue that applying for amnesty is basically selfincrimination, and that immigration-averse governments have an incentive to exploit the applications to identify and expel illegal workers. In our Nash equilibrium only applicants with the highest income are granted amnesty, and the poorest immigrants do not apply. In addition, it is not possible to establish a reputation because the players are different every time the game is repeated. Thus, fiscal revenues are sub-optimal and amnesties are an inefficient way to make illegal workers come forward.

Keywords: Amnesty; illegal immigration; time consistency; incentive compatibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: H59 J61 J68 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-05-28
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-iue and nep-mig
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.csef.it/WP/wp315.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Fiscal Revenues and Commitment in Immigration Amnesties (2016)
Working Paper: Fiscal Revenues and Commitment in Immigration Amnesties (2016)
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:315

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 ().