Emigration Opportunities and Effective Governance

• In Event: Governance of Immigration and Emigration in Institutions

Abstract

What are the effects of international migration and its restriction on effective governance at home? A large literature across social sciences has explored the economic and political impacts of actually occurring immigration flows on receiving and sending countries (for a review, see Powell and Nowrasteh 2020). More recently, scholars have also examined how the mere presence of migration opportunities can affect citizens’ collective action and political mobilization (Sellars 2019; Somin 2020). The extent to which these (often counterfactual) opportunities for international migration can impact the incentives of domestic governments and policymakers themselves has been unclear.

Contrary to existing accounts of political participation and government responsiveness, I view voters’ choice (not) to engage in domestic politics as an active decision conditional on potential costs and benefits of emigration. Building on the classical frameworks that elucidates the importance of credible exit options (Tiebout 1956, Hirschman 1970), I further argue that the very opportunity of exit empowers citizens regardless of whether they use it. As a result, while most people are not expected to migrate much under either more closed or open borders, governments are expected to be much more responsive and provide better services to potentially mobile voters.

Building on this insight, I then develop a formal model of multiple strategic jurisdictions and show that governments have an incentive to mutually restrict immigration in anticipation of limiting emigration opportunities of their own citizenry. In turn, the resulting absence of credible exit options for most people enables greater predation and abuse by the government. I then extend my model to multiple citizen actors and consider how the absence of credible exit options for some may further explain why governments are less responsive to poorer voters—one of the major findings in the public policy research. Overall, my model predicts that governments should provide better and more equal services to citizens with greater opportunities for international mobility.

To test my theory, I compare government performance and responsiveness in various subnational jurisdictions depending on their differential migration opportunities. To that end, I construct an original dataset linking the best available estimates of public service quality, government responsiveness to the rich and the poor, as well as migration opportunities at the subnational level in 24 European countries (NUTS 2) for 1980-2014. I then exploit the differential accession of new member states to the European Union and Schengen, as well as group-specific settlement patterns of past migrants and the differences in transportation accessibility across subnational jurisdictions as plausible instruments for emigration opportunities (see Gonzalez and Ortega, 2013).

Overall, I find that exogeneous increases in emigration opportunities are associated with higher levels of government performance and its responsiveness to the poor voters in subsequent years. To complement the identification of these effects achieved by the difference-in-difference and instrumental variable assumptions, I also conduct a number of placebo tests confirming that these effects do not apply to the quality of private or local government services (that already face significant competition within countries) and that changes in migration opportunities does not relate to governments’ responsiveness to the rich (whose international mobility is arguably much less impeded regardless of existing migration restrictions).

In the end, I discuss the theoretical and policy implication of my findings. Theoretically, the results imply that mutually imposed migration restrictions may negatively impact governance at home and abroad by disincentivizing governments from being responsive to their citizens (and especially those who lack resources). More practically, these results suggest that increasing opportunities for human mobility can have positive externalities even if few people actually decide to migrate.

Author

• Alexander Kustov, University of North Carolina at Charlotte