The Effects of Migration Policies on International Migration Flows An empirical assessment

The effectiveness of migration policies has been widely contested in the face of their supposed failure to steer immigration and their hypothesized unintended, counter-productive effects. However, due to fundamental methodological and conceptual limitations, evidence has remained inconclusive. While the migration policy research is often descriptive and receiving-country biased, migration determinants research tends to be based on obsolete, theoretically void push-pull and gravity models which tend to omit crucial non-economic, sending-country and policy factors. More fundamentally, this poor state-of-the-art reveals a still limited understanding of the forces driving migration. This paper aims to fill part of this gap through a quantitative assessment of the short and long-terms effects of immigration and emigration policy measures on the volume of total and bilateral migration flows between 1950 and 2010 when controlling for the effects of other relevant sending and receiving country determinants of international migration. The paper is part of the ERC funded DEMIG (Determinants of International Migrations Project) and draws upon new, unique data sets generated by the project: DEMIG C2C (bilateral flows – 1950-2010); DEMIG TOTAL (gross flow); DEMIG MIGPOL (migration policy); DEMIG VISA (global visa database).