Immigration policies in the EU: failure or success? Evidences from Italy

This work aims to study the effectiveness of immigration policies, empirically measuring if policies shape immigration and on what extent they can be considered restrictive. Secondly, we intend to explore how much immigration policies, among other factors, have an impact on migration inflows. Our study focuses on Italy, as one of the EU member states with the largest migration inflows, during the period 1990-2013. We use legal texts to assess policy effectiveness building a composite migration policy index. Results show that while immigration policies become more restrictive during the observed period, they are not effective because of economic and demographic factors. These factors lead the governments to be more open to immigrants, using several amnesties to cope with labour market shortages in an ageing population.