published in: Barry Chiswick and Paul Miller (eds.): Handbook on the Economics of International Migration, 1B, 2014
This chapter summarizes the main trends, policies and empirical evidence regarding immigration in Europe. We start by providing descriptive evidence on long-term immigration trends and current characteristics of the immigrant populations in various important European destination countries and Europe as a whole. We then discuss key policy issues in the European context, focusing on access to citizenship, asylum seeking, border enforcement, amnesties and policies to attract talent. In the second part of the chapter, we provide a survey of the large and growing literature on the recent European immigration experience, focusing on two key questions: what has been the socio-economic performance of immigrants in their destination countries and how has immigration impacted these countries' economies and native populations.
We find large and highly persistent gaps in the economic performance of immigrants relative to natives in most destination countries, with only few instances of encouraging progress. Overall, there is little evidence of a detrimental effect of immigration on the economies of the host countries, which appear to respond to immigrant inflows through mechanisms more complex than simple factor price adjustments.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.