quia festival Internacional de economía Jah able to model this for several times he has represented some themes and topics that he is going to deepen for us today and for sure with him we're going to talk about international migration about the causes and the effects about the integration of immigrants and immigration as an important hot topic so these are some of the impelling topics and I believe that it is going to be very very interesting to listen to Professor Hutton's analysis of the situation and if possible recipe for solution Europe for sure does need a European immigration policy one of the main criticisms towards Europe actually focuses on the immigration issue and in Trento throughout these days we have analyzed this issue from different viewpoints our Minister of Internal Affairs mr. Maroney has spoken about this here in prenta advocating for a strong European stance mr. Maroney claims Europe cannot leave Italy alone as far as this problem is concerned and in dialogue with mrs. Benigno this topic was addressed and mrs. Benina gave two signs of alarms number one there is no recipe for solution so it is necessary to research to think to look for concrete solutions and on the other hand the needs for approximately 2.5 million workers in our country in the next 10 years another significant figure but i do not want to steal too much time away from professor Hutton's slot and i would like to leave him in the floor if necessary I will try and for the deep and professor Hudson's presentation with possible questions at the end let me first of all say how pleased I am to be here it's wonderful to have an invitation to speak at the Trento Festival I'm extremely grateful to the organizers particularly Tito Bowie and his team who have organized the program and I think it's been a really fantastic festival and I've enjoyed it very much I also want to thank you the audience for for coming because I've seen how engaged the audience is have been in the events I'd been to and I really welcome you and I'm very glad to see that you're here especially when there's music and dancing outside in the streets and it's a beautiful day so I'm all the more grateful for your attendance at this session let me apologize for speaking in English I if I were to try and speak in Italian I think the talk would be extremely short because I could say sort of more less all the Italian I know in about you know 30 seconds I will try and speak slowly though for those of you who are receiving this through the translation so if I don't speak slowly please put your hand up and I'll I'll try and slow down okay the the thing I want to talk about today is as the title indicates immigration policy with a particular focus on Europe and let me give a little bit of background to that I'm going to take an economic focus which is not surprising I'm an economist there is a large literature that has been developed by economists and much of it is focused on the causes of immigration from between countries and also on the effects of immigration on the country to which immigrants go and just recently in the last let's say less than 10 years there has been an increasing focus on immigration policy not only from the point of view of what immigration policy does what it can and can't do but also from the point of view of what immigration policy should be and in order to think about that we have to think about a number of questions and I want to show you what the questions are in a minute but what I'm going to do in this talk is to try and give you an overview of some of the analysis that's been done by economists but set that in a rather wider context of immigration policy okay so I mean these are some of the what I think are some of the important questions that we what we might want to ask about immigration policy how many immigrants do we want to have in our individual country or in the EU as a whole what sort of people do we want to invite to be immigrants to our countries on what basis do we choose those immigrants I mean what what is the argument for a certain type of immigrant as compared with another type of immigrant that's something that economists I think you've got something to say about but we also have to engage with the with the immigration systems that we have got and we want to ask well how do immigrants come into our country or what are the mechanisms what are the channels through other streams if you like through which they come and then what follows from that is well what levers do we have what policies can we introduce or use in order to adjust immigration to the level that we consider to be desirable so how do how does immigration policy work and then finally and this is the sort of bottom line if you like from much of this should we run immigration policies in Europe as individual country policy should we have a separate policy for Italy and a separate policy for Germany another one for the UK or should we increase should we move towards a genuinely integrated policy across Europe so I don't think that's a big question for the EU as a whole and I will come to that at the end okay so to start with I want to just show you what is wrong wrong button I want to show you something about what economists say how they think about immigration so this is the sort of textbook model if you like of of immigration you'll see this in introductory text in economics and let me explain what what this diagram does I'd say this is the only diagram I'm going to put in this so if you are slightly amused by this don't worry this is the only one you'll see so along here we have the labor force or we can think about this is employment if you like along the horizontal axis and then on the vertical axis we've got the wage and we're just going to think about the average wage here and then along here this downward sloping line here which I've labeled d1 you can see that this is the demand for labor the national demand for labor so it's downward sloping which means that employers are willing to employ more workers if they have a lower wage and that's the standard sort of treatment in economics this these two vertical lines this first one is the supply of labor and this is the supply of labor before we have any immigrants and so we can think of a pre-migration equilibrium if you want to call it that as a situation where the supply of labor is here the demand for labor comes down like this and the wage is determined by the intersection of those two points at w1 ok so that's all so far so good now what happens when we have immigration so the standard economic analysis says well one of the most important features of immigration not the only feature but one of the most important features is that it increases the supply of labor so this vertical line here s1 shifts to the right to become s2 now you can see what implication that's going to have provided that we are employing all or most of these additional workers that is we move from an equilibrium point here a to an equilibrium point down here B now that has some implications more people are employed obviously as we've moved the labour force out to here but you'll see that the wages fallen from w1 to w2 that's one of the important factors let me just point to this as well this is the wage that immigrants would have had in their home country before they became immigrants so w2 is still way above the wage that immigrants would have got so they're moving from a low-wage country to a high wage country now economists analyze this picture in terms of the total welfare for the economy and there's what is called the immigration surplus and that immigration surplus is this triangle here why so there is a game for an integration for society as a whole but more important than that there's distributional effects what you can see is that the wage went down from w1 to w2 so workers who were originally employed lose an amount X this box here on the other hand employers will benefit from this because they're getting work workers more workers at a lower wage gain area X plus y so that's why there's an overall surplus because the loss to workers is outweighed by the gain to employers but you can see their distributional effects some people are worse off some people are better off the final thing to point to is areas Zed this is the gain to the migrants themselves now this is a very simple diagram it's not very it's just stylistic but it really tells you I think what the debates are about in terms of immigration policy you can make this much more complicated but the fundamental issues are the same their distribution effects and there's an overall game so what do we know about all this well let's see the immigration surplus is pretty small as most people estimate it maybe not 0.1% of GDP that's a very small number the distributional effects are much bigger it's not surprising some people's wages are going down some people's profits are going up and that has a much larger effect around the small triangle I showed you however this is somewhat contentious because economists have spent many years trying to estimate the fallen wages for non immigrants as a result of immigrants coming in and the range of estimates is something like this if we had a 10% increase in the labor force as a result of immigration the estimates are in the range of 0 no effect at all to maybe a fall in the wage of 3 and that's not a huge number but it's still significant as I've said before the biggest gainers are the immigrants some recent studies have Illustrated this is for the US that migrants from countries or countries to the US gain by a factor of about four over what they would have got if they stayed in their home country those from the poorest countries the gain is a factor of about eight so the biggest beneficiaries of immigration are the migrants themselves some other work suggests that if we had a modest I won't say what modest is a modest loosening of immigration policy over the developed world then the gains in terms of those sorts of areas I showed you could be as much as one hundred and fifty six billion this is in about 2001 and just to stress again the most of the gain that accrues in the host countries is to the immigrants themselves okay now think about the sort of political economy of this lots and lots of people in Italy in Britain in most countries are wage recipients most of us work for a wage a few people relatively few are Bronte's receive profits rents and so on but there are the minority so let's now think those who receive profits and rents are going to gain those who receive wages on this analysis at least are going to lose so if we all have one vote then the policy is going to be determined by who's more or less in the middle and that's going to be the median voter and the median voter is not going to want any immigration so what this standard analysis suggests is that we won't have much immigration notice also that the people who gain most from immigration the migrants themselves don't have a vote not at least not before they come so if we're setting an immigration policy now we're doing so on the basis of people who are already here and we're not doing so on the basis of the benefit that though the people who would come if we had a generous or open immigration policy we don't count their votes at this point so that's a bit puzzling and we say well why do we see immigration at all when if this sort of political economy story has any attraction to it whatsoever well one argument which has been made prominently by some Italian economists among others is that actually employers carry more weight in terms of their influence over immigration plots and we've seen this in a number of contexts for example in the United States where it's been most explored you can think of the employers for example who are keen to employee Mexican migrants in the southern southwestern states of the u.s. they have a lot of political muscle in Washington so it's that kind of story but let me let me finally add a caveat to all this and that is that we saw that the estimates of the wage effects actually sometimes not very large at all if that's true then workers don't really lose very much and employers still gain quite a bit and so that might be another reason why we have immigration policies that admit fair numbers of immigrants despite the fact that the standard approach would suggest we would be very tough on immigrants now let's suppose that we do have that situation we still need to resolve another question that is what if there are different types of workers suppose there are skilled workers and unskilled workers that's the standard way of dividing people up what difference does that make well you could have a diagram very much like the one I've shown you before in which instead of thinking about workers and employers instead we think of skilled workers and unskilled workers and we leave employers out of the picture a little bit so let's now think okay we've got two sorts of workers or two sorts of people who are skilled and the unskilled in our economy and it's not surprising that if we apply the same sort of analysis that you've seen already that if immigrants are skilled then skilled non immigrants are going to lose and unskilled non-immigrants are going to gain on the other hand if the immigrants are unskilled then it's clear that they will be competing directly with unskilled non-immigrants those are the people are going to lose the skilled immigrants who are now us are either skilled non immigrants or natives who now have more unskilled workers to work with them are going to going to gain that's one point but here's another thing which is being put forward more recently and that is what we worry about among other things is what the effects of immigration are not just on our economy and on wages and profits but rather also on the budget the national budget this is something which you know is a particular concern to many of us right now when we've seen big budget deficits and cuts and public services and so on and it turns out that when we look at opinion polls for example people are quite worried about the effects of immigration on taxes and benefits and there are two stories you can tell about this one is suppose that when immigrants come in taxes are just benefits stay the same now sealed immigrants typically are high income they're less often unemployed and so if the taxes are just then skilled workers will favor skilled it integration because it helps to ease the tax burden they will have to pay less tax to support a given amount of welfare state and other social expenditures and so on on the other hand if when immigrants come in the effect is to lower the amount of benefits that go round to people because the benefit pot is fixed and therefore it's shared among a larger number of people each person gets less as a result then unskilled workers are going to be very concerned about unskilled immigration because it dilutes the benefits which they might get when they're unemployed or other social benefits so that's another concern that's been raised by economists recently and what actually one of the most improvement of those arguing this case is Tito Boyer II who's the scientific director of this conference a third thing I think which is widely believed and understood not very well understood by economists I might say is prejudice I mean we've seen in Europe considerable opposition to immigration which doesn't really arise from these sorts of issues but which is based on prejudice on the idea that immigrants are different from us we don't really want them living next door to us marrying our daughters becoming our boss and so on and that's not to be ignored I think it's it's an important issue so let me just sort of show you what these sorts of that sort of thinking adds up to you I tried to tabulate in this table the arguments I've just I've just given you and so it depends on they've got four columns here we can think of what people's attitudes would be if immigrants are skilled how would the what was the attitude be of skilled workers and of unskilled workers two skilled immigrants coming in on these two columns we can see supposing immigrants are unskilled what will the reaction be of skilled workers skilled people and unskilled people as a result of these four things I've described earlier the wage effect whether taxes are just but the benefits are just and prejudiced and I don't want to go through all the cases because I've already described it but if you just look at these panels what you can see is that over here we've got a lot of negatives a lot of minuses over here as compared with over here and one over here actually that suggests that on the basis of these sorts of arguments we our policy would be one that would encourage skilled migration highly educated and qualified people and would discourage unskilled migration so I've got two questions that follow from that what are people's attitudes look like towards migrants and migration we want to look quickly look at that and secondly what is the skill mix of integration look like when we when we look at the data and I'm only going to be skipping sort of rather briefly through this but let me give you a flavor of some of them at data that economists have often looked at now this is an opinion survey that was taken in 2003 I'm sorry it's a bit dated now but the advantage of it is that it covers a wide range of countries this is the International Social Survey program survey and they only do questions on immigration once in a while and so this is the most recent one we've got and what they do is ask people questions about their attitudes towards immigration and then they ask them to score on a one to five scale what their particular attitude is now in these columns here the five is bad for society or bad for the economy or take jobs away one would be very good for society very good for the economy and so on okay so that's the way it is scaled now a fairly neutral attitude remember it's 1 to 5 a neutrally would be about 3 right somewhere in the middle and when you look at these columns here you see that actually we're not as opposed to immigration as many people would like to think and when most people are neutral or a little bit positive on average towards immigration now of course there's a wide range of attitudes within that all the way from 1 all the way up to 5 but on average it seems that most people are fairly neutral towards it similarly is immigration bad for the economy well some people think it is some people don't think now and on average you know it's around 3 in these countries differs a bit between countries as you can see do immigrants take our jobs away and leave us unemployed that's one of the biggest arguments that we hear in the popular debate about immigration here's what people think which is that well a balance more or less in the middle some people yes some people know a lot of people in the middle what about the attitude towards immigration policy this is getting a bit closer to you know to what what we want to see happen in terms of immigration policy should we reduce immigration by a lot by a little keep it about the same increase it by a little increase it by a lot that's the scale one to five a rather the five is reduced immigration by a lot you can see that we're a little bit more negative here we are somewhat more negative here and so there's there are things other than these that are coming into it prejudice would be one but it's not the only one so we're on balance somewhat against immigration but not not as strongly against it as you might as you might expect if you read some of the reports in the press you might point to this which is my own country which is one of the most anti-immigration countries in Europe and I'm somewhat embarrassed by that okay so I've said a bit about that let's have a look that now at what our immigrants are actually like now of course you could measure immigrants and classify them in a variety of different ways lots of ways of looking at people and classifying them one way or another and the way economists have looked at this and largely it's a result of the sorts of surveys and data that we have available is to look at people by their level of education the highest level of education that they've got and we've got a number of surveys that show that and this is just one of them and the reason I picked this is because you have seen by the way in the attitudes I show you before Italy wasn't there and the reason is that it's not in that particular survey so I picked this one to make sure Italy was in there and here's the proportion of non-immigrants this is age 25 and over and the proportion of immigrants who have these tertiary education and you can see it varies quite a bit across countries some of this is change differences in debt in precise definitions but the broad picture is I think fairly clear and the broad picture is that among our immigrants about the same share of immigrants have tertiary education as of non-immigrants so broadly speaking immigration is not altering the share of people with higher education so it's not really the case as some times we think that we're either recruiting all these wonderful nuclear physicists who are actually not going to be needed after our referendum next week but and neither is it the case that we're we're just you know having very low education migrants when you look down this end of the table which is those with less than upper secondary education I wish we could show those with very low education that is less than primary completed primary education but it's not in this particular data set you can see that in some countries at least we find that low-skilled immigrants are a bit more prevalent among immigrants than they are among non immigrants so there's some cases here and I again let me say if we were to look at those people with very low education or like no education we would find a much higher proportion of that among immigrants than among the native-born so there is some evidence that and you can see it's not all that different from countries outside the EU you can see there's some evidence that we do recruit quite a lot of low-skilled immigrants and that may be something we don't want to do so much of for the reasons that I've already mentioned let me switch now to what the policy channels are well what are the one of the ways through which immigrants come into the country and the reason I'm doing this is because I had a conversation yesterday with emma bonino who who thinks that most people are not really aware of how the migration system works and therefore or less clear in their distinction between these different types of groups and some I think this is if she's right which I think perhaps she is then it's worth doing okay so let me just switch to the next slide then and this is some data which I pulled out for 2007 one reason for that is that it's it's so normal years before the Great Recession so I don't want to upset things with that these are these are just published data and from the OECD and I've just taken a selection of countries here somewhat similar to the ones you've seen before and what this is telling us is of the migrants who came into these countries in 2007 what channels did they come through and we I grouped them here into four main channels one is employment these are people who enter the country to on the grounds that they are getting a visa for employment so they're the people who for whom the they come in through the employment string secondly this column is people who enter through family reunification in other words the reason they're coming in is because all the way they're coming in is because they're getting entry through being married or having relations with somebody who's already in the country right so there may be children there may be parents there may be other relatives but they're often spouses that's the main thirdly we have humanitarian migration this is refugees asylum seekers who apply for asylum in the various countries and finally here this is free migration and this is migrants from one EU country to another EU country they're not a subject to immigration policy and they're free to move around wherever they want to and you can see that's a very large number relative to the number that we admit under other on other grounds what I want you to take away from this is that employments relatively small right employment already significant for some countries but on average it's a relatively small part of immigration and economists worry all the time about skills and the labor market and employment and so on but I can tell you now this is only the tip of the iceberg it's not the whole iceberg this is only one part of immigration and not a particularly big part and if we're worrying about how we're going to select more skilled migrants for employment which i think is a good thing but if we're worried about that it's only going to apply it's only going to apply to this relatively small proportion and so you're not going to revolutionize the pattern of immigration by simply tightening up a little bit on the skill requirements that are needed for someone to come in for an employment visa and in fact it for most countries those people who come on employment visas as permanent migrants not as temporary migrants as permanent migrants are relatively skilled anyway so we're not going to get much leverage out of more skill selection applied to the employment string family reunification is a very big one as you can see here and humanitarian immigration refugees and asylum seekers which has actually gone down by quite a lot in the last decade are significant but now in 2007 at least not as large as they were let me talk first about for all about of silent you know let me step back a bit one point I wanted to make before leaving this is you may say well this is the bit that we've got some control over as far as immigration policy is concerned these two components we don't really have much control over after all family reunification is determined by you know whether people have got relatives we can't simply block out everybody's relatives that would be against of you know human rights conventions and all sorts of other EU legislation that's very difficult to do we can't really you know be tough on refugees because we are signatories to the Refugee Convention we have to observe that so you might say well actually immigration policy is quite severely constrained when you look at where we can actually take action that's not quite as true as it seems and I'll explain why something I've studied at in some depth is asylum and across the OECD there was a big fall in asylum applications between 2001 and 2006 most of these people not most many of these asylum seekers arrived illegally and they are perfectly able to apply for us I mean even though they've they gained entry illegally that's not a disqualification only about 25 percent gain some form of a recognition or status from this procedure and many of the others often stay illegally not all but quite a few these migrants often have rather poor outcomes as far as the labour market is concerned but also as far as things like housing health all sorts of other dimensions of social integration asylum seekers actually do rather badly out and one key element is how do they gain employment how do they do in gaining employment and the answer is not very well several studies this is just one but several studies have shown that refugees and asylum seekers have have a real tough time in getting jobs and they more often rely on on social security social welfare what's happened in over the years is that our attitudes towards refugees which we not in most people in European countries are very positive about providing sanctuary for people escaping war and persecution not surprisingly most people are very positive about that but the attitudes have soured a bit over the last 15 20 years the reason is that people are coming in illegally because there's no other way for them to get in and that illegality has undermined support for the asylum system so asylum has become conflated with illegal immigration in a way that's made it very difficult to pull these two things apart so people's attitudes towards asylum have become much more negative largely because they're conflated with illegality but can we do anything about this is it possible to do anything well I think the answer is it is I've done some work in the last few years to try and analyze what difference policy makes to the number of people who apply for asylum in other words are tougher asylum policies our deterrent to people coming and applying for asylum many people say no human rights activists often say well you know all we're doing is making the asylum seekers suffer even more than they would otherwise we're not deterring them because there are these are people fleeing persecution it's not going to be influenced by our policy well I don't think that's true here's the bit of evidence here's my policy index here tougher policy as we move from left to right change in asylum applications as we go up here and you can see here that the generally speaking this is across various different countries of the OECD all of the EU plus US Canada Australia so on that's what these dots are so you can see there's a general negative correlation between these two things tougher policy fewer applications on average and a more sophisticated analysis of this looking at individual countries over time what happens when policy changes entirely supports that that picture family reunification can we do anything about that or not it's something which economists have almost completely forgotten about I have to say they haven't really looked seriously at family migrants and this is it's a potentially important part of migration as I've shown you one reason is that you know we can see how many people come as family reunification migrants based on one initial principle immigrant right this work has been mainly done for the US here's some evidence here about the family reunification multiplier if you admit one principle immigrant how many other people are you then essentially going to admit and that's what the answer is up here one thing that comes out of this is that the multiplier is larger for poorer countries if you take a principal immigrant from you know become the Congo you'll get more relatives than you will if you take a principal immigrant from you know new zealand or some other rich country quite clear interestingly just as an aside when the United States is an interesting experiment a policy experiment the United States in 1965 moved away from a policy favoring essentially Europeans only to one that was anti-discriminatory across the world and some people argue that we don't want to change the you know the nature of American society we want it to be basically a European a sort of anglo-saxon led European type of society not one which is like the Congo or Nigeria or you know Indonesia or China so what we'll do is we will make our immigration policy one which has family reunification as its center at center stage most of the migrants will admit will be family reunification people and since the people we've already got here all Europeans that should mean that we'll just get more and more Europeans they were wrong completely wrong and the reason is that the martyred fire is much much bigger for people in other countries from other countries can we do anything about it well a number of countries have reformed their conditions for family reunification among them France and the Netherlands we should become much tougher on the conditions both for the principal applicant that is the person that you're going to reunify with has to be have a job have a certain level of income not be dependent on Social Security the migrant increasingly has to be familiar with the country have language relevant language skills and a whole list of other things this graph shows that this is a policy index for family reunification where at this time as we move from left to right policy gets more generous so it's different from what I showed you for asylum seekers and here's the share of family migrants as a proportion of the foreign stock of limas you see it you know roughly speaking upward sloping so there is some scope to manage migration through these other streams and not just through the employment stream I want to mention one other thing which I which which is a particularly horse of mine cuz I think it's important and that is students many European countries like the US Canada and Australia as well but many European countries recruit overseas students they're not counted in the numbers you saw before because they're not permanent migrants there are temporary migrants they only get temporary visas for the period of their study many of them don't return or many of them actually would like not to return and a number of European countries that include Britain in that we're not willing to let them stay until recently and that seems a bit odd because these are young people we need young people they've got qualifications that are relevant to the host society because they've been studying there for three years they've taken an advanced degree so they're well qualified they meet other people from the country they get networked they make friends they've got contacts these are people who are perfect for the labour market in the in the country they've gone through no not all of them want to stay but some do what's more they pay it's a wonderful system they pay to come and not only that they cross subsidize the education of many non-immigrants because they pay quite high fees many of them and furthermore they keep me employed here's a an illustration of the sort of magnitudes that are involved against for 2007 it varies a lot between countries but I want you to look at just the last column here because what I've done here is to take the ratio of the student inflow divided by the total permanent migration for that year okay so it's just a just to scale the the students relative to other migrants you can see that for quite a few weaken on for quite a few European countries this is a reasonably large number I mean it's pretty big for France in Germany it's huge for the UK it's even fairly strong for fairly large for Sweden and Switzerland rather low I'm afraid for Italy in Spain this is a wonderfully good policy if we want to select strongly motivated highly qualified as well as simulated migrants from abroad so that's just my sermon on that let me now end by discussing very briefly the policies that we've gotten and how it's been developing in recent years we've seen a number of initiatives to try and select more skilled migrants and we've had green cards issued for example in Germany in the UK we've loosened up on allowing students to stay we have now gone backwards on that I'm very sorry to say in asylum we've had an enormous crackdown as you saw in policy which is largely satisfied public opinion but has left us in a bit of a mess as far as the international refugee regime is concerned and we've seen that some countries have toughened quite severely on family reunification and I think one background to this actually has been the expansion because what some countries like clearly continental European countries have done is to they worry a bit about people from places like Romania Bulgaria and they think well if we're gonna get a lot of unskilled workers from those countries maybe we should become even tougher or where we where we do have control which is on immigration from outside the EU so I think that's been part of the story in recent years what about the EU as a whole well we've had some harmonization the Schengen treaties important Schengen agreements important and since 1999 there's been a very gradual process of harmonization of policy focused largely on asylum but also directives on things like family reunification long term residence so the scope for individual countries to adjust their posts independently has gradually been narrowing it's not all that narrow at the moment but it's gradually narrowing the hague process built on that between 2005 2010 and now we're in a third phase which is the Stockholm process and the purpose of all this has been to harmonize policy but after all it's still not gone very far policy is still largely under national control okay so let me should we should we have a EU wide policy then what would be the gains from having a policy at the EU level rather than letting individual countries decide I mean you might think that individual countries know best what not know what's best for them and therefore they should be free to have whatever a policy suits them and their electors will will vote for so there now the main reason for thinking that any UI policy is worth having is that is what economists call externalities this is something which when I do something it affects you not through some market mechanism but just affects you directly we can make this argument very clearly in terms of asylum refugee and humanitarian policies let me tell you the reason for that it is that if we all think that it's good to rescue people who are suffering from persecution in far-off countries and give them a safe haven in our country then I also feel good if Germany does that because I know those refugees are being looked after I feel good if Italy does that I also feel good if my own country does it right now if refugee looking after refugees is something which we think is a benefit to the EU as a whole individual country policies don't take into account the benefit of those policies to other countries right that's the that's that's the the sort of market failure if you want to call it that I've been told pressing this line for some years and I have a little book coming out just in a couple of weeks time with the Center for Economic Policy Research in London which again makes this argument forgive me for the advertising but I just said that what we've been doing is harmonizing getting policies the same across countries and different countries as you saw from the tables earlier face very different numbers of people applying for asylum because of their proximity to for example Libya or something like that currently or previously to Kosovo they're facing very different demands if we have a uniform policy on admitting asylum seekers we shall end up with very uneven refugee burdens across our different countries and that's not what we want what we want is a spread around the countries so what this implies is that we do need some form of burden sharing there's this has been debated since the mid 90s and very little has been done about it we do have a directive of 2001 which calls for burden sharing as a voluntary balance of efforts between EU countries it doesn't work I mean people won't sign up to it well they signed up to but it if you won't volunteer to do it we need to some mechanism at the higher level to make it happen so that's the story I want to argue about asylum and refugees what about other forms of migration what is there a case there for European integration well some people argue that there are negative spillovers that take place when you tighten the border in one place people move to another place to try and get across the border we've seen that very clearly demonstrated in the border controls between the u.s. and Mexico so that's one possible reason and some people have argued that but but overall the argument I think is less strong for immigration policy than it is for asylum and Refugee policies and the externalities are less obvious that's one reason and secondly we are actually moving in in the same direction so perhaps it's not such a big issue one argument might be well we what we want to do is to give weight to poverty reduction right you I saw a showed earlier on how massive the games are for migrants coming from very poor countries to rich countries like Britain Italy France Germany or the u.s. if we put weight on that we want to make these people better off then okay we can bring back in these sorts of arguments that say let's do that and but but if Germany does that or Italy does that I should feel good about it even though I'm living in Britain so that would be the argument there I think it's a weaker argument frankly than it is for asylum now there are two other arguments I want to stress here which I think actually if anything are more important one which has come to the forefront recently is if we admit migrants to one country and they skip across the border to another country and they cause that country problems or consternation or or you know difficulties I'm not saying that's what happened I don't think it did really then each country's immigration policy affects the other country rather directly so if we want to protect the Schengen Agreement and keep borders within Europe open one way of doing that or help what one step towards doing that is to try and unify our external policy towards immigration across Europe a bit more than we've done so far but in my view actually the strongest argument of all is politics if you look across European countries and there's been an outbreak of this recently in northern Europe you see that immigration policy and particularly refugee policy seems to be determined very largely by extreme right-wing parties they seem even though the parties are often very small what they do is they raise the salience of Immigration and Refugee issues in the public mind through the newspapers and so on and as a result of that it's not that they of V they get into government they don't always get into government but they do shift the agendas of them of the mainstream parties and insofar as these are based on xenophobia on prejudice on other fears that actually don't have much basis of fact then we don't really want that to drive our policy if we can take some of the more you know some of the hotter issues a lot of domestic policy politics and decide this and determine this at the EU level then I think we'd have a more liberal and I think a more a policy that would better serve the people of the EU now you might say well nobody's going to want this right and we just don't want us we want our own policy isn't that what public opinion says actually it's not that clear if you look at the European social survey for 2002 threes it's going back a bit but it was a time when there were huge numbers of refugees and asylum seekers coming in and you ask people would you like immigration and Asylum policies to be set at the international level at the European level at the national level or as in Swiss cantons at the local level and a majority of people in Europe said 57% said they would rather see immigration asylum policy set either at the international level or at the European level right so I think actually despite the fact that you may feel that this is not going to be a popular policy I think there would be enough popular support for it to make it happen and that's it thank you Graziella we saw happen many thanks professor hatun now let's see if there are questions or comments from the audience there is a person there ask him for the microphone please identify yourself my name is Serge obrigado and I deal with the immigration policy I've been doing that for 20 years in Italy now I found Professor patterns can you hear me can you hear me hello can you hear me testing testing can you hear me testing testing can you hear me professor Hutton can you hear me can you can you hear me okay I found your presentation very interesting and I later had to illustrate some comments and then I'd like to have your opinion well I'll speak about the Italian situation because I know the regulations in Italy and I know the situation in Italy well of course an international or a European policy on immigration can have certain advantages for example when you define minimum standards in terms of rights of immigrants in terms of family reunification or a free circulation for employment reasons in the case of permanent immigrants but with reference to selection mechanisms well each country would like to do on its own so they each country wants to decide alone well this depends on the fact that the immigration that each country needs today is different it varies from country to country for example in Italy we have a lot of low qualified immigrants perhaps they are educated people but they are employed in welfare services home services and that's because in Italy these services are missing and so perhaps this is not the case for Germany well I think that a possible solution could be not so much to have common rules and common standards for selecting immigrants because in that case nobody would be happy about that but a possible solution would be to have the possibility of a special selection and the possibility of mechanisms for attracting qualified people so that it is possible to keep that type of immigration which perhaps I came to the country for a low qualified job but then it's a type of immigration which shows capacities and skills an example we could favor for example a permanent stay for these people for example so what's your opinion professor Hatton on all these comments comments these are very important and interesting questions I think what I would say is that it's not all that clear to me that there is such a big difference between European countries on this I mean for example we've we've agreed to have a European blue card a way to try and encourage highly skilled migrants to come into Europe and that's you wide policy which we've managed to agree on as far as the low skilled migrants are concerned I mean I'm not so as against low skilled migration as it might seem but what I would argue I think is that we can recruit low skilled migrants through other channels than the employment stream and what I would say about low skilled migrants is that we do have other other methods which I haven't actually mentioned here which I think are important that is temporary migration I think temporary migration actually is a very good way of you know filling those holes in the economy seasonal differences in employment for example in agriculture and other sorts of areas like that I think we can plug a lot of these gaps in in those in low-skilled labor market with temporary migration and I mean you know if you look at the unemployment numbers not just now but even three or four years ago what you can see is that there are a lot of unskilled unemployed and you know that there doesn't seem to be a great shortage in most European countries of unskilled workers who would be willing to work at what we might regard as a reasonable minimum wage so I I'm not entirely convinced about the shortage of unskilled workers I think insofar as there is specific need in certain sectors we can plug that with temporary migrants other questions well I'd like to make a question as a curious journalist and a like to have your comment well in the current debate many criticize Lady Ashton the Foreign Minister of the European Union while others say that the minister is not guilty that mrs. Ashton is not guilty it's not to be blamed it's a question of policies and there are some who blame single countries because of different policies so what's your idea of the current situation on the immigration policy and are there solutions aggression policies I mean I think I've laid out the route that we've taken in the EU which is step-by-step process of harmonization and I welcome that I think that's a good idea I wish some countries that have opted out not I'm not going to name them but the countries that a lot have opted out would opt in there are three of them and you know I think so I think we're on the way to a more integrated policy I won't say we are on the way to a completely integrated policy where we can make most progress in my view is in asylum and refugees I thought we could also do something on family reunification because I don't see no reason why we shouldn't have uniform relatively uniform rules about that for the EU but I do think I mean we have a number of the building blocks in place now to do this for example in Asylum going back to us and once again we have European refugee fund we have the European Asylum support office I mean there's a whole structure there now which can be used which but which doesn't have executive power and that's the trouble with it really and we're not further back with policy towards immigrants generally a skill stream family reunification these other other areas I see no reason why we can't integrate on stream by string that's not that I think we could do I mean the idea of sort of erecting a massive you know immigration policy from nowhere is just not consistent with the way the EU works is it is step by step to three steps forward maybe one step back we just keep going we gradually integrate that's what's happened over the last 50 years in the EU and that's what's happening here as well I think and I think the as Esther Duflo said yesterday the thing is to get the understand the problem first and then approach it step by step yeah a policy of small steps this is something that is very well known also in Italy there is a comment here or a question so there's another Dias I'm a Chinese student University of Toronto and I feel great will have the opportunity to study in Italy and it's people very nice to give her the resources in helpful informations to improve my education skills yeah but I found that there's a tension between the immigration community and the local community and most of my Italian friends find difficult to make friends with immigrants especially for the people from ization they have different cultural background different values and for Chinese people or Asian people find difficult to get integrated to the local community so I wonder if there is a way to change the public opinion to have safer public involvement to solve the problem of the integration and provide more services towards immigrants to eliminate the threaten in the public sphere and especially I I have some limited unhappy experience you know once when I entered the conference hall and Italian guide pointed here his finger to me that you should go away go back to your China and I felt very upset but after that I found that there must be a way to solve their this problem to change the public opinion to let the local community feel safe feel comfortable to accepted immigrants who are temporary make it especially for us the students from very took twenty hours flight to come here and have home sake and very difficult situation thank you gratia gratia para la sua testimony so thank you so much for your personal experience well of course I express my sympathy for what happened to you and I certainly blame those idiots who told those words to you professor hat on your comment thank you very much for the question congratulations on coming to study in Italy and I really do hope your studies turn out successfully and you enjoy the rest of your time here because I think it's people like you that we do attract let me say something about how this I mean I said earlier that the attitudes towards immigrants vary a bit across countries and and what you see actually they is that it's not all that been all that much change over time in the last say 15 years where you have what we haven't seen changes in attitudes has been in countries who've received immigrants a large surge of immigrants who where they previously had very few and the countries I have in mind for example are Spain and Ireland right what that says to me is that you know when when when immigrants who are unfamiliar from unfamiliar flesh faces from unfamiliar places suddenly arrive especially if they arrive in large numbers that's a bit of a shock and it's hard to you know it takes time for for host communities to get used to immigrants to accept and value what they bring and to appreciate the sort of cultural diversity that they bring along with them now if you look at countries that have long accepted lots lots of immigrants places like the United States Australia which I spend half of my time in they are much better at it than we are in Europe I think and there's a good reason for that they've been doing it for much longer than we have and so we do get better at it in the second point is that and I think the message from that is let's not have you know our massive we want to do it bit by bit step by step that's the best way to do it I think because we will integrate people much better if we do it like that I think it's it's we have to admit prejudices there there's no question about that and it's silly not not to try and ignore it education is one of the main ways of reducing it because if you look at all the surveys and the data you can see attitudes that our prejudiced are much less often found among educated people one of the most clear is the clearest thing you can see in the data so education is important a third thing that's important is anti-discrimination law we've got that in Europe we've developed it more and more and we have also been again step by step introducing methods or measures to better integrate my grits not people like you I have to say because you're at University but people who come in as asylum seekers refugees and other migrants the we had a series of initiatives to better integrate people like that with programs and language and employment and so on but that's not really going to do the trick because what we need is to is to change our own attitudes the host country attitudes and that will happen gradually and you know you can see the effects of that yeah CheY well thank you for your optimism professor Hatton I share your optimism I'm gonna ask the question in English I'm Johanna parry but I teach in California and the gentleman who just spoke if you don't feel too well in University trying to apply to University of California half of our body of student is Chinese will welcome you the my question is on the step by step and I and I understand very well and I agree with Tim about the need to coordinate the policy on refugee on asylum seekers and I think there are a lot of benefits in doing this probably in this specific field the externality is very clear and the question will be as in many other type of policies in Europe my question is would a coordination across country work or would we need an EU Authority may be invested by the single country at some point but with an executive power itself to run this this has worked for many policies right monetary policy for a while we coordinated at some point we needed a European Central Bank if we wanted the whole thing to work so the question is as long as our the Italians the Greek to enforce some common Authority there will always be unless the rules are super clear maybe even Otto marek there will always be this idea of there is an isometric burden are you envisioning this sort of a creation of an eu-wide authority or what would be your way of thinking of going that way Thanks I think that we do need an e with authority I mean coordination between countries sometimes works and sometimes it doesn't work too well but I think the only way particularly for asylum and refugees we do need a an EU Authority and as I was saying earlier on and we do have the building blocks to create that I mean we've got a number of steps to go but we already have a the European assign support office we have a European refugee file so we do have you know some common elements already that could be built upon to build a EU wide Authority now the way I would see this working and this is important because you know you don't want to superimpose a completely new administration on top of what we've already got at the country level the way I would propose it is that the European Asylum support office is oh should be greatly strengthened and what we should have is an easy office in every country or any or neither representative right so somebody who is embedded in the institutional structure of that country so that you can then impose an eu-wide policy without creating a whole new administration and and deliver it through the existing institutions of that country so that would be my that would be my plan and actually going back to this question about whether whether people were supported or not I mean support for an international or European level Asylum asylum and immigration policy is much higher than it is for a europe-wide agricultural policy or europe-wide monetary policy two things that we actually have in most parts of Korea we don't know do a demand do it right we have time for a couple more questions if there are any when the columnist I just want to ask about what you were mentioning the fact that there is there is there are unemployed unskilled workers in various European countries and and the immigration is it's a mix of skilled and unskilled see how true is the argument that the unskilled natives natives are unemployed because the unskilled immigrants take away the jobs because they are willing to work for a lower wage so is there any evidence that research with the case and can add on just another question about what you just said about people highly educated people being less prejudiced against immigrants do you have to do with the fact that highly educated Eva actually wealthier and richer so there actually is easier time the assumption is a position to being less prejudiced than perhaps poor people because education is really correlated with a level of wealth thank you much good questions and actually they strike right to the heart of a lot of the research that economists do on this let me very come clean about the question of whether unskilled immigrants displace native-born unskilled workers there is a huge controversy over this some people say they do and they prove it with some data that they've gotten appearing on us they do other people find nothing the prevalent result I think is small or nothing so you know we don't have a lot of evidence and there is differences there are differences between different studies so it's not possible to be completely definitive about that my guess is that the answer is the effects are probably small but you know there is a diversity of opinion on that question of Education is it is it income or is it is it sort of liberal culture you know and that's a good question some people have recently been studying precisely that issue and it's a bit difficult to tease that out of the sort of opinion poll data that I showed you a little bit on but people people started to do that and for EU countries basically the result is that it's a bit of both it's about one-third income and social opposition not being in competition with these people with with unsecured immigrants and about two-thirds of it is cultural values so it's a bit of the aunt your aunt your spot-on saying that there are these two things and you know that's the evidence it's a bit of both but cultural values a bit more important than its parts reparative a demand love it one last question on the point doing a point system something like Canada has done in a comment someone made earlier coming from California we have a large agricultural sector that's been tried repeatedly in California for example to use the low skilled or unskilled unemployed person to go into the fields to pick strawberries and to put immigration around so that the other workers aren't there or pick grapes and one is that that kind of labor is a little more skilled than you think and the second one is perhaps the people who are unemployed which in in America is usually less benefit than in most countries in Europe that I know of nonetheless the workers last hardly more than one hour or two hours so there's sort of that difficulty which I guess you're solving by the sort of temporary green card thing of coming in now to that point then you have to think about the question of the temporary worker who marries someone who develops the relationship and actually marries someone and has a child during the time that they are in in in Europe let's say the temporary worker in policies a family reunification in Europe you don't have the American thing on citizenship of if you're born in the country you're automatically a citizen and which is entirely another question than what you talked about today but anyway that was just a little thing that came to mind with regard to that level of worker and what we have a lot of experience particularly in the state from which I come questions and III agree with the fact that we shouldn't just trivialize the skills that are involved in some of these occupations I mean they are they are definitely skills of one sort or their manual skills rather than brainpower so to speak but but that's not undervalue that unskilled people are unemployed are often difficult to move and they don't necessarily want to move for a short season because you know there's other opportunities they may get it's a bit difficult for to do that that's why I do recommend temporary worker programs because they they have worked reasonably well and actually there's some experiments going on in other parts of the world too which have shown in quite substantial benefits from temporary worker programs for the workers themselves and there's a there's an experiment going on for example of temporary workers going from Pacific Islands like Fiji and so on to New Zealand for a season to work in agriculture and viticulture and that's been a tremendous success has helped both you know the New Zealand farmers and it's helped they the people back home so I would argue that so very welcome for as far as family unification is concerned I'm not arguing that we should abolish family reunification by any means I'm just saying that it is possible to alter our policies on that but if somebody has the chitta McClane to family reunification given what our laws and rules are then we should give it to them I I don't and I wouldn't want to argue against that but you know in the u.s. as you know there's a very generous family reunification policy that extends not just to immediate family but which which are not even under the US quota but to more distant family members who are subject to an overall worldwide quote quota in the US immigration code but still are very large numbers of them and actually they are in the majority of permanent legal migrants to the u.s. professor Hudson before letting you go I have one last question if you allow me also because I was really stricken by reading the online news about the beginning or the recovery or the first corpses since about sank last Tuesday with more than 800 people on board just off the Tunisian Coast so maybe this morning we haven't addressed the role or the media the role of communication means the role of journalists in an attempt at trying to overcome the prejudice factor which you have so well described in your presentation well I realized that this question could be the topic for another conference but I have to ask you this question so what can the media do as far as public opinion is concerned what can information do proposal was made some months ago of a European radio which could be the seeds for a European information public service so we could start with immigration as an important unifying topic for this European radio television network so which is your advice which is your recipe to promote via means of communication to overcome prejudice that's an interesting one I mean I always my heart always sinks as yours does when boats sink and when people aren't rescued and I think we need to do a bit better on that in as far as the from Texas considering which is the European agency responsible for protecting a border and patrolling at the moment North Africa there aren't many boats out there at the moment but we need to do a bit better on that having said that the vast majority of people who come as either asylum seekers or illegal immigrants to Europe don't come by boat there are people who typically come in with a with a visa tourist visa or some other visa and overstay the visa so I mean boat people are are massive in the media they're absolutely you know miniscule in terms of total immigration so you have a situation where the the plight of a few people is being blown up to represent you know immigration problems much more widely when it's really only a very small problem that's not say we shouldn't deal better with it so I'm not happy that does happen through the media and you know it's a good story for the media I mean it sells papers my worry about and I in might in the short book I've just written I do talk about this I don't really have a solution to it because you say well okay and we have a terrible media in Britain for this I mean we we have very what I think is very prejudiced media who really make pay on sort of sad stories like this and you know you you want to have some sort of press code but on the other hand no people buy these papers I mean you know this is you get the media that you you deserve in some sense if we're people going to continue to buy these papers then we're not going to solve the problem by providing another medium if that's what people want they want to read the papers that that they're currently reading and which have these sorts of stories in them so III don't think another newspaper or another radio station or another this or that is really going to solve the problem it is a problem I think and but it's not when I have a solution 2 p.m. on it really is more we believe in pluralism we believe in the possibility that through multiple channels the channel the message will pass so that we all can have a shared awareness of these issues so thank you very much professor Hudson thank you for your contribution thank you to the International Festival of Economics in Trento thank you to all of you and enjoy your day