3 paper, return policy also deals with large numbers of immigrants who arrive irregularly for economic or family reunification reasons and do not apply for asylum, and extends to the return of economic migrants who arrive legally but whose visas expire or whose services are no longer needed.

Over and beyond the fraught politics, appropriate policies towards asylum seekers and refugees – of which return policy is part – entail three types of consideration: humanitarian, legal, and economic. This paper will focus mainly on the economic implications of return while recognizing that the legal and humanitarian are an integral part of decisions. More specifically, the main question I address is whether it is in the _<u>economic self‐interest</u>_ <u>of host countries to return forcibly displaced persons.</u> The vast majority of refugees end up in developing countries such as Lebanon, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey, a subject treated in recent World Bank reports (Devictor 2016; Verme et al 2015). This paper instead aims to address the return policy of advanced countries that have seen a surge in the arrival of asylum seekers, such as Austria, Germany, Greece, Italy, and Sweden. While the United States is also a host to many forced migrants, the majority are resettled, i.e. their asylum applications are decided upon while they are in the country of origin or in a third country, so the issue of returning failed asylum seekers is less pressing. In the United States, the issue of return is just as politically prevalent, but it relates mainly to irregular economic migrants who infiltrate the Southern border or overstay their visas<sup>5</sup> , and even to the U.S.‐born children of those immigrants, but not to asylum seekers or refugees.

The weaknesses of data on the return of immigrants are well known: “If the data on international migration are generally poor, the recording of return migration is far worse” (Lucas 2005). The scarcity of analytical examinations of the forced displacement phenomenon is also well known. For example, a recent IMF report titled “The Refugee Surge in Europe: Economic Challenges” contains some 65 bibliographic references, of which nearly all deal with immigration generally and only about five deal mainly with refugees. (Aiyar et al. 2016).

Despite these lacunas, I believe that the available evidence and analyses as set out below allow this paper’s main conclusion, namely that the costs of hosting asylum seekers and refugees are front‐loaded, while the benefits accruing from their integration into the labor market and the host economy typically take years to materialize. It follows that from the 5 Tight immigration restrictions exist both across the EU and in the United States, and they are extreme in the case of unskilled workers. In both the US and EU the result has been large numbers of undocumented immigrants. For example, the IOM estimated that 3 million illegal immigrants resided in the EU in 2000, double the number of ten years earlier, representing about 1⁄4 of the official non‐ EU population. The INS estimated that 7 million illegal immigrants resided in the US in 2001. In the US, approximately as many illegal workers entered the US as did under official temporary work visas (Lucas, 2005). In the US, while efforts have been directed at attracting skilled immigrants and denying official entry to unskilled immigrants, the effect has been that unskilled immigrants have continued to represent a high proportion, but illegally.