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Immigration Law

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Encyclopedia of Law and Economics
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Definition

This contribution considers scholarly works on immigration law with a focus on law and economics insights into labor migration and refugee law.

Introduction

Immigration, that is, the movement of people – usually for permanent residence – into another country or region to which they are not native, is in many respects regulated by the countries concerned. In the following, we discuss some typical motives of migrants (Chap. 2), deal with the most important welfare effects of immigration and their distribution (Chap. 3), and try to understand why nation states regulate immigration more restrictively than the mobility of goods and capital and why international agreements on immigration are less frequent than those on trade and investment (Chap. 4). In this chapter, we also discuss the free movement of people in the EU as an example for a far-reaching cooperation in this field. Finally, we conclude this entry with some ideas on asylum law from an economic perspective (Chap. 5).

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Jerg Gutmann and Peter Weise for valuable comments and André Plaster for useful research assistance for an earlier version of this contribution.

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Correspondence to Thomas Eger .

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Eger, T., Weber, F. (2021). Immigration Law. In: Marciano, A., Ramello, G.B. (eds) Encyclopedia of Law and Economics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_531-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_531-2

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  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4614-7883-6

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Chapter history

  1. Latest

    Immigration Law
    Published:
    16 July 2021

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_531-2

  2. Original

    Immigration Law
    Published:
    29 September 2014

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-7883-6_531-1