Illegal immigration and multiple destinations

This paper examines the efficacy of internal and external enforcement policy to combat illegal immigration. The model features search-theoretic unemployment and policy interdependency among multiple destination countries. With one destination country, internal and external enforcement policy have similar effects. With multiple destination countries, we consider prototypal geographical configurations. In one, all destinations are contiguous with the source country, while in the other only one destination country is contiguous with the source country. In both cases the equilibrium external enforcement policy level is lower than the joint optimum, calling for supranational authorities to implement immigration policy. In the absence of such policy, we consider the effect of delegating border control policy to one destination country and find that delegation of authorities to the largest country can improve each destination country ’s welfare relative to the Nash equilibrium level.

Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University

2015-09-15

English(eng)

technical report

VoR

29

Discussion paper series / Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University

https://hdl.handle.net/10086/27476