Evaluating migration policy effectiveness

The effectiveness of immigration policies is a highly contested issue. While some scholars argue that, overall, immigration policies have been effective (Brochmann and Hammar 1999), others counter that efforts by states to regulate and restrict immigration have often, if not mostly, failed (Castles 2004a; Cornelius et al. 2004; Düvell 2005). Migration policy ‘pessimists’ usually argue that international migration is mainly driven by structural factors such as labour market imbalances, inequalities in wealth and opportunities and violent conf licts and persecution in origin countries. Because migration policies have little or no inf luence on such factors, immigration restrictions would primarily change the ways (or modes) in which people migrate, but leave long-term trends and volumes largely unaffected. They argue further that once migration communities in destination countries reach a certain size, migrant networks, employers and the ‘migration industry’ create an internal dynamic of self-perpetuating movements of people that is hard to stop (Castles 2004a; de Haas 2010).