Migration into the Welfare State: Tax and Migration Competition

This paper provides overview of recent work on migration and welfare state tax policies: 1. I survey the literature on the tax burden of migration. 2. I empirically identify the differential effect of the generosity of the welfare state on the skill composition of immigrants across the two groups (the "free-migration" group and the "policy-restricted migration" group) in an unbiased way. 3. I outline the implications of the tax burden of migration to tax competition within a union, facing migration from the rest of the world.Each host country in a competitive regime balances on the margin these gains and losses from migration. In doing so, each country takes the well-being of the migrants as given. Therefore, It ignores the fact that a tax-migration policy that admits an extra migrant raises the well-being that must be accorded to migrants by all the other host countries, in order to elicit the migrant to come in; and more capital income leaks, through capital taxation, to immigrants.