Growing Restrictiveness or Changing Selection? The Nature and Evolution of Migration Policies1

By Hein de Haas, Katharina Natter, S. Vezzoli. International Migration Review, 2014

195 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper demonstrates that, since 1945, migration policies have overall become less restrictive. Challenging common assumptions, this long-term trend is robust across most of the 45 countries included in the DEMIG POLICY database. While the period after 1989 is characterized by a slowing down of the rapid post-WWII liberalization of migration policies, liberal policy changes have continued to outnumber restrictive policy changes until today. Yet policy developments differ across policy types and migrant categories: Entry and integration policies have become less restrictive, while border control and exit policies have become more restrictive. Also, while policies towards irregular migrants and family migrants have been tightened in recent years, less restrictive changes have dominated policies targeting high- and low-skilled workers, students, and refugees. The essence of modern migration policies is thus not their growing restriction, but their focus on migrant selection.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0640d4c53321cfc7162d5463f06f4fa80334941e

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Citations in the corpus

International Migration: Trends, Determinants, and Policy Effects (2019, background): “Rather than a turn toward increasing restrictiveness, this shows that there has been a deceleration of liberalization since the 1990s (de Haas et al. 2018).”