Paper Walls are Easier to Tear Down: Passport Costs and Legal Barriers to Emigration

By David J. McKenzie. 2005

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Increased attention to the development potential of international migration has led to calls for greater global cooperation and for industrial countries to consider temporary worker programs and other options for increasing the number of immigrants admitted. But less attention has been devoted to policies that migrant-sending countries pursue that impact on the ability of people to emigrate under the existing system. This paper documents the existence and impact of two such policies: passport costs and legal restrictions on emigration. New data collected on passport costs in 127 countries reveals enormous variation in the cost of a passport from one country to the next. One in every 10 countries in the sample is found to have passport costs exceeding 10 percent of annual per capita income. High passport costs are found to be associated with poor governance, especially in terms of the quality of the bureaucracy, and with lower levels of migration. Countries that place legal restrictions on the rights of women to emigrate are also found to have lower migration rates than countries with similar income and population levels. These findings suggest there is scope for some developing countries to receive greater benefits from migration by tearing down the paper walls they place around their own citizens.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/91462b018faeaf5bc160d2d6af4c13d88cfec343

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Citations in the corpus

Does Development Reduce Migration? (2014, background): “Prior to migration, potential migrants must finance costly prerequisites that can include overseas search, insurance, transportation, education, visa fees, passports (McKenzie 2007), and smuggling (Salt and Stein 1997).”
Barriers to Exit (2006, unknown): “Also, the justification for not dividing a 10-year passport price in half is that potential migrants must pay the full cost of the passport upfront (McKenzie, 2005).”
South-South Migration and Remittances (2007, background): “According to a survey of 127 countries undertaken in 2005, the cost of obtaining a passport in 14 of those countries was 10 percent or more of annual per capita income (McKenzie 2005).”
Bringing It All Back Home – Return Migration and Fertility Choices (2015, background): “(49)McKenzie (2007) provides evidence of the impact of the “paper walls” connected to obtaining a passport on outgoing migration flows.”
Migration and Development: Dissecting the Anatomy of the Mobility Transition (2017, background): “[54] shows that high passport costs are associated with poor governance, and thus lower levels of emigration.”
Migrant Networks and Foreign Direct Investment (2006, unknown): “We employ the information on passport fees from McKenzie (2005).”
The determinants of international migration: Conceptualising policy, origin and destination effects (2011, background): “After all, authoritarian, non-democratic states also tend to curtail the freedoms of people to migrate, either through blocking exit or by creating bureaucratic obstacles such as excessive costs to acquire passports (de Haas and Vezzoli 2011; McKenzie 2005).”
International Remittances and Income Inequality: An Empirical Investigation (2006, unknown): “Along the same lines, McKenzie and Rapoport (2004) argue that, a priori, the effect of”