Conceptualizing and measuring migration policy change

Abstract

This paper outlines the methodology of DEMIG POLICY, a new database tracking around 6,000 migration policy changes in 45 countries between 1945 and 2014. The article conceptualizes the notion of migration policy change and presents the coding system used to operationalize policy content, changes in policy restrictiveness, as well as the magnitude of policy changes. The paper also discusses the potential of DEMIG POLICY to improve our understanding of the nature, evolution, and effectiveness of migration policies. Besides significantly extending the geographical and historical coverage of existing migration policy databases, DEMIG POLICY also tracks emigration policies in order to overcome the common 'receiving country bias' in migration research. By offering key insights into the main features of the largest migration policy database completed to date, this paper hopes to provide useful guidelines to improve future efforts to measure migration policies. Such improvement is crucial given the heated debates on migration policy effectiveness on one hand and the still limited empirical evidence on this issue on the other.

The Global Evolution of Travel Visa Regimes

“…The compilation of DEMIG VISA coincided with other efforts to collect migration policy data, such as Mayda and Patel's (2014) database of migration policies for 14 OECD countries for the period 1980–2000, its subsequent extension (until 2006) by Ortega and Peri (2012), and the Immigration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) which covers 25 countries over the 1960–2010 period (Gest et al., ) (for a review of these and other migration data compilations, see de Haas et al. ). Organizations such as the UN, OECD, and the World Bank have compiled flow and stock migration data (see Parsons et al.…”

Indexing Immigration and Integration Policy: Lessons from Europe

“…Moreover, this table does not even include immigration policy indices—a comparative latecomer to the index literature. Some of these include Timothy Hatton’s Asylum Policy Index (Hatton & Moloney, , Hatton, ), Martin Ruhs’s Openness and Migration Rights Indicators (); Helbling, Bjerre, Römer, and Zobel’s () Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC); the International Migration Policy and Law Analysis (IMPALA) database (Beine et al, ); Cerna’s () index of states’ openness to high‐skilled immigrants (HSI); and the Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG) policy database, which tracks policy change across 45 countries between 1945 and 2013 (De Haas, Natter, & Vezzoli ).…”

Policies for Recruiting Talented Professionals from the Diaspora: India and China Compared

“…With the exceptions of Ruhs’ () and de Haas et al. (), the databases cover only OECD and/or high‐income countries. These comparative policy analyses are largely based on “a pre‐determined set of policy variables” (de Haas et al., , 2) by coding country‐specific policy ideals, components, and the assessments of their efficacy.…”

“…With the exceptions of the de Haas et al. () and Czaika and Parsons (), almost all existing comparative research has been conducted from the perspectives of the receiving countries in Global North. In terms of analytical approaches, the studies have undertaken both quantitative and qualitative analysis.…”