Introduction
In the third chapter of my thesis, I investigated whether the reception decisions of countries facing asylum seekers applications was interdependent with the decisions of their neighboring governments.
While my paper focuses on asylum migration, I came across several contributions that collected data on national policies on migration. Here you may find the list with some details.
A list of national migration policy datasets
| Name | Source | T span | N span | Values span | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mipex | Migrant Integration Policy Index 2020 url | 2007-2019 with some change from 2014. | 56; EU (with UK), Albania, Iceland, North Macedonia, Moldova, Norway, Serbia, Switzerland, Russia, Turkey Ukraine, China, India, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, United Arab Emirates, Canada, Mexico, US, Argentina, Brazil, Chile, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. | 0 to 100 for each subindicator. Policy area score: avg. cross indicators. Tot score: avg. cross policy areas. | Policy indicator components relate to one of 8 policy areas: Labour market mobility; Family reunification; Education; Political participation; Permanent residence; Access to nationality; Anti-discrimination; and Health. |
| DEMIG policy | url | 1945-2013 | 45: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium,Brazil,Canada, Chile, China, Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, German Democratic Republic, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Morocco, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal,Russia Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, South Africa, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, US, Yugoslavia. | Policy change: more restrictive (+1) or less restrictive (-1) (0 is also possible) within the existing legal system; Magnitude: major, mid-level, minor or fine-tuning change. | Other info exists on: policy area (border control, legal entry, integration, exit), policy tool (recruitment agreements, work permit, expulsion, quota, regularization, etc.), migrant group (low/high-skilled workers, family members, refugees, irregular migrants, students etc.) and origin (all foreign nationalities, EU citizens, specific nationalities etc.) targeted. |
| Polmig | url | 2013-2019 | 23 out of 28 EU countries (the Baltic states, Malta and Cyprus are not included) | as DEMIG policy | Continuation of DEMIG policy. |
| DEMIG VISA | url | 1973–2013 | travel visa requirements for 237 nationalities in 214 countries | 0: Visa/Exit permit not needed; 1: needed; 2:not allowed to travel to dest. | |
| World Population Policies | Policy on immigration: UN url | 1976, 1986, 1996, 2001(2)2015, 2019*(to harmonize) | 199: all UN Members and (some) non-member States | Raise; Maintain; Lower; No intervention; No official policy | Subcategories (with missing values): permanent settlement; temporary work; highly skilled workers; family reunif.; integration; govt. view. |
| IMPIC | url | 1980-2010 | 33 OECD countries | indicators’ restrictiveness scale: 0 to 1 | comparable to DEMIG: see url. 4 fields: labour migration; family reunification; asylum/refugees; co-ethnics. |
| Immigration policy, Peters, Margaret E. (2015) | url | different starts by country: 1787-2010 (unbalanced) | 19: Australia, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, US, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, UK, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia | PCA based on several hand-collected indicators | Areas considered: border regulations, enforcement, immigrant rights. |
| Sub-national, for the US Immigration Laws and Current State Immigration Legislation | url | 2008-2021 | US States | Rich qualitative description, many subsections. | |
| Policy change dummy (OP), Ortega, Peri (2013) | url | 1980-2006 | 12 OECD countries | Entry restriction changes: loosening (-1) vs tightening (+1) | Builds on collections from Mayda and Patel (2004) and Fondazione Rodolfo De Benedetti (2007) |
| Asylum migration Safe countries of origin list | Machado & Guichard 2022 | 2000-2017 | 19 OECD countries of destination (dyadic dataset): Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK, USA. | Specific policy: classification of an origin country as safe in the context of asylum requests | One version of the data collected is found in Chapter 3 of Guichard 2020 url |
| Asylum migration Estimated processing times (Bertoli et Al.) | url | 2009-2017 (monthly) | 32 destination countries (dyadic) in Eurostat | Processing times are predicted based on stocks of first-time and pending applications | More measures from Eurostat are detailed in the paper. |
Notes: A similar, partially overlapping table is offered in Rayp, Ruyssen and Standaert (2017), see url. Other mentions: http://www.temperproject.eu/research-areas/impol-database/; https://www.knomad.org/data/migration-and-the-law-database
References
Bertoli, S., Brücker, H., & Moraga, J. F. H. (2022). Do applications respond to changes in asylum policies in European countries?. Regional Science and Urban Economics, 93, 103771.
De Haas, H., Natter, K., & Vezzoli, S. (2014). Compiling and coding migration policies: Insights from the DEMIG POLICY database.
Fondazione Rodolfo DeBenedetti, “Social Reform Database”, 2007 http://www.frdb.org/language/eng/topic/data-sources/dataset/international-data/doc_pk/11028
Guichard, L. (2020). Three Essays on the Economics of Migration. Doctoral dissertation, Université Clermont Auvergne (2017-2020).
Helbling, M., Bjerre, L., Römer, F., & Zobel, M. (2017). Measuring immigration policies: The IMPIC database. European Political Science, 16, 79-98.
Mara, I., & Kovacevic, S. (2021). wiiw-POLMIG Database: An Inventory of Migration Policy Changes.
Mayda, A. M. (2010). International migration: A panel data analysis of the determinants of bilateral flows. Journal of Population Economics, 23(4), 1249-1274.
Ortega, F., & Peri, G. (2013). The effect of income and immigration policies on international migration. Migration Studies, 1(1), 47-74.
Peters, M. E. (2015). Open trade, closed borders immigration in the era of globalization. World Politics, 67(1), 114-154.
Rayp, G., Ruyssen, I., & Standaert, S. (2017). Measuring and explaining cross-country immigration policies. World Development, 95, 141-163.
Solano, G., & Huddleston, T. (2020). Migrant integration policy index. Migration Policy Group.