De facto Openness to Immigration

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Nedelkoska, Ljubica, Martin, Diego, Lochmann, Alexia, Hausmann, Ricardo, Bahar, Dany, Yildirim, Muhammed A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Nedelkoska, Ljubica
Martin, Diego
Lochmann, Alexia
Hausmann, Ricardo
Bahar, Dany
Yildirim, Muhammed A.
author_facet Nedelkoska, Ljubica
Martin, Diego
Lochmann, Alexia
Hausmann, Ricardo
Bahar, Dany
Yildirim, Muhammed A.
contents Various factors influence why some countries are more open to immigration than others. Policy is only one of them. We design country-specific measures of openness to immigration that aim to capture de facto levels of openness to immigration, complementing existing de jure measures of immigration, based on enacted immigration laws and policy measures. We estimate these for 148 countries and three years (2000, 2010, and 2020). For a subset of countries, we also distinguish between openness towards tertiary-educated migrants and less than tertiary-educated migrants. Using the measures, we show that most places in the World today are closed to immigration, and a few regions are very open. The World became more open in the first decade of the millennium, an opening mainly driven by the Western World and the Gulf countries. Moreover, we show that other factors equal, countries that increased their openness to immigration, reduced their old-age dependency ratios, and experienced slower real wage growth, arguably a sign of relaxing labor and skill shortages.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16407
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle De facto Openness to Immigration
Nedelkoska, Ljubica
Martin, Diego
Lochmann, Alexia
Hausmann, Ricardo
Bahar, Dany
Yildirim, Muhammed A.
General Economics
Economics
Various factors influence why some countries are more open to immigration than others. Policy is only one of them. We design country-specific measures of openness to immigration that aim to capture de facto levels of openness to immigration, complementing existing de jure measures of immigration, based on enacted immigration laws and policy measures. We estimate these for 148 countries and three years (2000, 2010, and 2020). For a subset of countries, we also distinguish between openness towards tertiary-educated migrants and less than tertiary-educated migrants. Using the measures, we show that most places in the World today are closed to immigration, and a few regions are very open. The World became more open in the first decade of the millennium, an opening mainly driven by the Western World and the Gulf countries. Moreover, we show that other factors equal, countries that increased their openness to immigration, reduced their old-age dependency ratios, and experienced slower real wage growth, arguably a sign of relaxing labor and skill shortages.
title De facto Openness to Immigration
topic General Economics
Economics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16407