Abstract
Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty on the migrants' supply, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the median voter, or prefer a larger number of migrants. We show that, if the incumbent prefers more migrants than the median, he might find it optimal to announce a binding quota to be re-elected, and strategically relax its enforcement, or choose an ineffective instrument like border control.
Highlights
Enforcement plays a fundamental role in the implementation of many policies that rely on legally binding provisions, such as licensing, taxes, tariffs or quotas to regulate economic activities
Even countries with well developed institutional structures and legal apparatuses face enforcement problems. This is for example the case in the domain of immigration policy: while the regulation of international labor flows features prominently in the political agenda of most Western democracies, those very same countries seem unable to get to grips with the large numbers of undocumented aliens they host
Instead, illegal immigration only takes place when the number of migrants entering is higher than a binding official quota, and the phenomenon arises endogenously as the result of the migration policy chosen by the government, i.e. the combination of quotas and resources allocated to their enforcement
Summary
Enforcement plays a fundamental role in the implementation of many policies that rely on legally binding provisions, such as licensing, taxes, tariffs or quotas to regulate economic activities. The combination of uncertainty on the supply of migrants and asymmetric information on the preferences of the politician implies that the public cannot perfectly infer the politician’s type and the cause of illegal immigration, e.g. limited policy tools versus lax enforcement. In this environment, rational voters use outcome measures of performance – i.e. the total number of migrants in the country – to gauge the incumbent’s type.
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