The Effect of Visa Policies on International Migration Flows

International migration flows are the combined effect of individual decisions to change one’s own country of residence in search of better living conditions. Whether they leave their source country freely or are forcefully ejected, international migrants try to choose the destination that offers them their highest level of satisfaction and happiness. However, as in any individual or collective maximisation problem in economics, the decision of choosing which is the best country to live in is subject to restrictions. Migration policies can, in principle, either ease or increase these restrictions, but they will only be able to do so if they are effective, that is, if they do, in fact, ease or restrict the access of international migrants to the countries where they are implemented. There was very little evidence on the effectiveness of migration policies until the end of the 20th century. The widespread perception was that the rigorous migration policies of the United States before World War I (Hatton and Williamson 1998) had succeeded in stemming migration flows, but the very coincidence with the war made this claim difficult to quantify. The main reason for this lack of quantifiable evidence was the difficulty in obtaining both high quality data on migrant arrivals and a homogenous coding of migration policies. In a seminal paper, Hanson and Spilimbergo (1999) tried to overcome these problems by looking at the effect of hours spent patrolling the US-Mexico land border on apprehensions of Mexican undocumented immigrants at the border. They computed an effect of their migration policy variable (hours of work on enforcement) on a proxy for international migration flows (apprehensions). However, they could not translate this estimation into an effect on actual migration flows, as they lacked the data required to do so. Their work nevertheless gave rise to a large body of literature on the effects of border controls on migration flows, mostly focused on Mexico to US migration. Despite the emphasis on undocumented border crossings, most of the international migrants to the United States and other developed countries actually travel by plane. When travelling by plane, a potential migrant may or may not need a travel visa to enter her destination depending on her country of origin. In order to facilitate tourism or business travel, many destinations exempt particular countries of origin from this travel visa requirement, offering their citizens a visa waiver. Together with Francesc Ortega, we first noticed that these visa waivers could actually have huge effects on regulating international migration flows (Bertoli et al. 2011). When Spain introduced a visa requirement for Ecuadorian travellers in August 2003, Ecuadorian immigration to Spain dropped by 80% and the effect of the policy was almost instantaneous (see Figure 1). In the five previous years Ecuador had become the second country of origin for immigrants in Spain, with over 400,000 arrivals. Later research showed that this type of effect was not specific to Ecuadorian inflows, but had a relevant role in explaining the Spanish immigration boom from several origins between 1997 and 2009 (Bertoli and Fernández-Huertas Moraga 2013) and general immigration flows to OECD countries between 1990 and 2000 (Bertoli and Fernández-Huertas Moraga 2015). 1 Furthermore, these visa policies generate externalities, in other words, migration flows to third countries are also affected by them. When Spain introduced its visa requirement for Ecuadorians, this not only reduced migration flows from Ecuador to Spain, but also increased those from Ecuador to alternative destinations like the United States. This externality on third countries was first estimated by Bertoli and