Immigration amnesties in the southern EU member states - a challenge for the entire EU?

The question of how to proceed with illegal immigrants arriving in the southern EU member states is one of the pressing policy issues for the EU. In our article we will provide a thorough analysis of immigration policy and immigration amnesties from an economist’s perspective. In particular, we are interested in answering questions such as why (at all) some states legalize irregular immigrants and what effects unilateral policy measures in this field have in an economic union such as the EU. While most of the work in the area of immigration amnesties focuses on the single country case we extend this scenario to the case in which the legalizing country is part of a federation and spillover effects between different states may occur. Several interesting aspects will be considered in this context, in particular, potential changes of the policy mix between internal and external enforcement on the one hand and legalization on the other hand when a federal setting is considered instead of a single country.