Many OECD countries have changed the rules for immigrants in recent decades, generally making harder to enter and to stay. France is one example. This paper studies the immigrants' response to the 2004 reform of the immigration law, which made it harder for foreigners to obtain resident status....

We build a simple model of self-selection into migration and immigration policy determination. We first show that the effect of any immigration policy can be decomposed into a size and a composition effect. We then explore how the optimal policy may change once the latter effect is considered.