Sale of visas: a smuggler's final song?

Emmanuelle Auriol and Alice Mesnard

No 16-645, TSE Working Papers from Toulouse School of Economics (TSE)

Abstract: Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful at eliminating smugglers by eroding their profits but it also increases immigration. In contrast, repression decreases migration but fuels cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we show that legalisation through selling visas in combination with repression can be used to weaken human smuggling while controlling migration flows. Our results highlight the complementarities between repression and selling visas and call into question current policies.

Keywords: migration; human smuggling; market structure; legalisation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F22 I18 L51 O15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mig
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (16)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Sale of Visas: a Smuggler's Final Song? (2016)
Working Paper: Sale of Visas: A Smuggler's Final Song? (2012)
Working Paper: Sale Of Visas: A Smuggler's Final Song? (2012)
Working Paper: Sale of Visas: A Smuggler’s Final Song? (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tse:wpaper:30469

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