Legal or illegal? Preferences on immigration |
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Authors: | Ángel Solano-García |
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Institution: | University of Granada, Spain |
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Abstract: | The political debate about regularisation programmes for undocumented migrants is a very controversial issue. The main goal of this article is to explain why governments decide to grant amnesties to illegal immigrants as a part of their immigration policy. We propose a simple political competition model in which we first derive the voters' preferences over a menu of regularisation programmes. Labour market conditions make skilled workers more pro-regularisation than unskilled workers. We find that, in general, the policy implemented at the political equilibrium is a partial amnesty programme, which is what happens in the majority of the countries in this study. |
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Keywords: | illegal immigration regularisation programme enforcement policy Spain |
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