Immigration Policies in the Western World: New Indicators, Causes and Effects

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This project proposes to create a set of sophisticated quantitative indicators to measure immigration policies in 27 OECD countries. By means of this new and innovative dataset the causes and effects of immigration policies will be studied. Over the last two decades both immigration politics and research on immigration issues have become very important. So far, there is however hardly any study that investigates immigration policies over a large sample of countries. This stands in stark contrast to the study fields of integration and citizenship policies where more systematic data have been collected. Therefore, the first aim of this project is to create indicators that enable us to compare a large variety of countries. Not only the formal regulations will be accounted for. Control mechanisms and the implementation of regulations will also be studied. Moreover, the four fields of labor migration, family reunification, asylum seekers/refugees and access rights for co-nationals will be differentiated. The availability of such a dataset opens completely new research perspectives and allows testing already existing arguments in a more systematic way. Finally, the effects of immigration policies on migration patterns and the integration of immigrants will be analyzed. We will be able to test to what extent immigration policies lead to the intended output. By doing so, the effectiveness of immigration policies and the control capacity of Western states will be investigated.