De facto Openness to Immigration

TL;DR

This paper develops country-specific measures of actual openness to immigration, revealing global trends and factors influencing openness, such as demographic and economic changes, based on data from 148 countries over two decades.

Contribution

It introduces novel de facto measures of immigration openness, complementing existing policy-based metrics, and analyzes their variation and determinants across countries and time.

Findings

Most countries remain closed to immigration.

Global openness increased from 2000 to 2010, especially in the West and Gulf.

Increased openness correlates with lower old-age dependency and slower wage growth.

Abstract

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.