Documents immigration policy 130 results

"The 2015 refugee crisis in Europe fueled anti-immigration sentiment in receiving areas, with potential unintended consequences for refugee integration. We investigate the heterogeneity of political backlash across Italian municipalities in the aftermath of the crisis and assess the role played by local conditions at the time of refugees' settlement, distinguishing between baseline economic and cultural factors. By leveraging the quasi-random dispersal policy and using causal forests, we find that the impact of refugee exposure on anti-immigration backlash is significantly higher in more affluent areas, with more bonding social capital. The opposite holds in contexts where there is meaningful intergroup contact with former immigrants (e.g mixed marriages). We exploit this pattern of heterogeneity to evaluate a matching model to optimally assign refugees to locations and deliver policy implications for novel refugee resettlement schemes that minimize anti-immigration backlash."

"A sustainable EU Immigration Policy aims to contribute to a vibrant European society through more effectively and selectively managed immigration from outside the EU, more attention to integration of immigrants, more rooting out of discrimination, more asylum centres close to areas of conflict, and more attention to education and training in areas where refugees have settled. Immigration from outside the EU is often opposed, mainly because of sluggish integration combined with tensions in actual and perceived values between immigrants and native populations. These divisions affect not only the first generation of immigrants, but also those that follow. We propose a sustainable, win-win policy fostering the benefits of immigration and in line with the preferences of EU citizens holding not only positive but also more sceptical views on immigration while relying on adherence to human rights. The proposed policy is directed towards more effectively and selectively managed immigration based on the employability potential of the immigrant, combined with more attention to integration and stricter measures to fight discrimination. We also acknowledge the need for a robust policy framework to cope with asylum and abrupt large-scale waves of refugees wanting to enter the EU, resulting from conflicts, natural catastrophes, and other sudden or violent events. We propose screening schemes for refugee camps surrounding countries they have fled to determine migrants' refugee status, channelling them either as economic migrants, selected on their employability, or through a humanitarian scheme that respects the EU's multilateral and bilateral commitments. Such a humanitarian scheme would be embedded into education-cooperation policies, to provide better opportunities to qualify for admission and substantially greater support for refugees."

"This article analyses perceived in-group discrimination of 29,189 first and second generation immigrant respondents from 201 different countries of origin currently living in one of 27 EU countries. In addition to testing effects of individual factors, the article estimates the effects of macro-characteristics of both origin and destination countries and community variables. The migration history of these groups is relevant for perceived discrimination: immigrants with citizenship, who speak the majority language at home and have at least one native parent perceive less in-group discrimination, whereas religious respondents, especially from religions that differ more in comparison to the majority, perceive more in-group discrimination. Furthermore, macro-characteristics of the country of origin are most important in explaining differences between European countries. Immigrants from socio-economically more developed countries with higher living standards – and for that reason more comparable to the native population – are less likely to perceive in-group discrimination."

"The current situation regarding the migration of refugees can only be handled efficiently through closer international cooperation in the field of asylum policy. From an economic point of view, it would be reasonable to distribute incoming refugees among all EU countries according to a distribution key that reflects differences in the costs of integration in the individual countries. An efficient distribution would even out the marginal costs of integrating refugees. In order to reach a political agreement, the key for distributing refugees should be complemented by compensation payments that distribute the costs of integration among countries. The key for distributing refugees presented by the EU Commission takes account of appropriate factors in principle, but it is unclear in terms of detail. The compensation payments for countries that should take relatively high numbers of refugees for cost efficiency reasons should be financed by reallocating resources within the EU budget."

"The intensified international migration pressures of the recent decades prompted many developed countries to revise their immigration regulations and increase border controls. However, the development of these reforms as well as their effectiveness in actually managing new immigration flows remains poorly understood. The main reason is that migration regulations are hard to quantify, which has prevented the construction of a universal measure of migration policy. To fill this gap in the literature, we construct an indicator of the restrictiveness of immigration entry policy across countries as well as a more comprehensive indicator of migration policy that also accounts for staying requirements and regulations to foster integration. These indexes are then used to disentangle the factors determining the toughness of migration regulations. Our empirical framework combines elements from the median voter and interest group approach and accounts for cross-country correlation in migration policies. We find strong evidence of spatial correlation in particular in entry restrictiveness, while the impact of economic determinants of migration policy remains much more modest."

"In the late nineteen seventies and early eighties, the restructuring of the French automobile industry caused a significant reduction in the number of unskilled jobs. When the Board of directors of the Talbot factory in Poissy near Paris announced its redundancy plan in 1983, a one-month strike was launched to defend the work site and oppose the dismissals. But as the demands remained unanswered, some of the unskilled migrant workers, the first to be threatened by the redundancies, called for financial assistance to return to their home countries. Arising in the middle of the conflict, the new demand forced the strikers to reconsider their positions. Though union activists were uncomfortable with the demand, which they viewed as a renunciation to fight for employment, they ended up accepting it. As to the French government, it saw it as an opportunity, creating a new system to encourage migrant workers to go back to their countries of origin."

"There is a general consensus that welfare states influence urban inequality patterns in cities experiencing increases in immigration. Whereas much of the existing research focused on the extent to which welfare states affect the well-being of immigrants after their admission, this study focuses on how immigration policy regimes affect the extent to which immigrant flows, and subsequent labour supply, match variations and fluctuations in the composition of demand in urban labour markets. In particular, the article develops a comparison between Malmö and Genoa, an Italian and a Swedish city with similar urban histories that display considerably different patterns of urban inequality. Immigration to Malmö was fuelled largely by humanitarian emergencies in the countries of origin and occurred in a period of economic decline for the city. The growth of the immigrant population was associated with a worsening of the labour market situation for immigrants and an increase in ethnic residential segregation. Immigration to Genoa was mainly driven by demand for cheap labour, particularly in the private-care sector. Therefore, the growth of the immigrant population was associated with an ethnic segmentation of the labour market, but it also resulted in a more dispersed distribution of immigrants than in Malmö. The differences in the urban inequality patterns in Malmö and Genoa can be only partly explained by policies affecting the living conditions of admitted immigrants. An important role has also been played by the immigration policy regimes of the two countries, which prescribed the integration potential of immigrant flows."

"L'articolo sviluppa tre argomenti: 1) il fenomeno delle regolarizzazioni collettive, molto visibili e destinate a coinvolgere numeri cospicui di immigrati, e tipico soprattutto dei paesi dell'Europa meridionale, i cui mercati del lavoro segmentato hanno attratto ingenti volumi di lavoro irregolare; 2) regolazioni comuni degli ingressi nello spazio europeo, come gli accordi di Schengen, si sono mostrate inadeguate a fornire una risposta alle esigenze dei mercati del lavoro dell'Europa meridionale: le manovre di sanatoria possono essere interpretate come un aggiustamento a posteriori della discrasia tra politica e mercato; 3) soprattutto nell'Europa meridionale, ma non solo, la condizione di irregolarita si rivela transitoria e modificabile e le norme si rivelano selettive e applicate con gradi diversi di severita."