Migration policy trends in OECD countries

ABSTRACT

This article investigates whether migration policies in Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries have become more liberal or restrictive over the last decades and whether or not these policies have converged, especially among European Union (EU) countries. Owing to a lack of data, the few existing studies in this field have mostly focused on policy outcome data. Various and sometimes contradicting statements have therefore largely remained untested. This article analyses data from the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) project that includes measures for different policy fields between 1980 and 2010 in all OECD states. We find that the conditions and criteria for entering and staying in a country have become more liberal. At the same time, however, we observe that more restrictive control mechanisms have been put in place. We also find that there is a general convergence trend in the migration policy field that varies in intensity, however, across policy fields. We only partially observe any Europeanization effects.

KEYWORDS:

• Immigration policy
• OECD countries
• policy convergence

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Eugenia da Conceicao-Heldt, Sandra Lavenex, Willem Maas, Ines Michalowski, Natascha Zaun as well as the anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Marc Helbling is a full professor in political sociology at the University of Bamberg, Germany, and a research fellow at the WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, Germany.

Dorina Kalkum is a research associate at the Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research at Humboldt University, Germany.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [grant number HE6182/1-1]; Princeton-Humboldt Strategic Partnership EUROFORT: How the Rest of the World Affects European Integration.