IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cgd/ppaper/90.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

To Control Migration Flows and Defeat Human Smuggling, Sell Visas

Author

Listed:
  • Alice Mesnard
  • Emmanuelle Auriol

Abstract

Policymakers in most OECD countries face the challenge that they must fight people smuggling while retaining control of migration flows. Policies designed to increase border controls are not suffcient on their own; the level of enforcement that would eliminate people smuggling entirely would be extremely costly. Further, these policies have unintended consequences in the people smuggling market; they increase the fees charged by smugglers, increase reliance on their services, and increase their cartellization. By contrast, a visa-selling policy can weaken smugglers by decreasing their prices and squeezing their profits. However, eliminating people smuggling only in this way requires cheap visas and necessarily leads to a rise in the numbers of people migrating. An innovative policy of selling visas combined with enforced sanctions on employers and employees for illegal working can control migration flows and put smugglers out of business. Using the revenue generated to finance enforcement allows visa prices to be set at a high level that controls migration flows.

Suggested Citation

  • Alice Mesnard & Emmanuelle Auriol, 2016. "To Control Migration Flows and Defeat Human Smuggling, Sell Visas," Policy Papers 90, Center for Global Development.
    • Handle: RePEc:cgd:ppaper:90
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.cgdev.org/publication/control-migration-flows-and-defeat-human-smuggling-sell-visas?utm_source=repec&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=repec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cgd:ppaper:90. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Publications Manager (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/cgdevus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.