Migration Pressures and Immigration Policies: New Evidence on the Selection of Migrants

schemes, and the Gulf countries, the main destination for Egyptians where numerous temporary migration programs between these countries induce a rather high skilled migration.

Consequently, the data confirm the trend of macro data that the share of highly skilled immigrants is indeed much higher in countries with selective immigration policies than in countries with no such policies. The EU has only recently started to introduce more selective policies and in the past migration, has primarily allowed immigration through family reunification schemes.

These findings have several implications for EU immigration policies. The data, which was collected in 2006, shows that the selective schemes that many EU countries have recently introduced have not yet been successful. Thus, the data confirm the concerns about the composition of immigrants of many EU countries. The reason for this may be found in the strong network effects, also shown in this analysis, and in the fact that EU countries have comparatively large family reunification schemes that seem to dominate the selective immigration schemes. The EU already has a lower skilled composition of migrants compared to North America or Oceania. As a result these immigrant stocks may induce a similar composition of migrants, in particular when migration barriers are lower such as is the case of family reunification schemes. In addition, the migration cost reducing effect found in many studies disproportionally affects lower skilled migrants.

Also, countries with selective migration policies are often those with labor markets offering higher skill premiums to highly skilled workers. As shown by very recent research such as Grogger and Hanson (2008), these labor market opportunities immensely impact on the kind of immigrants the respective countries attract. In addition, the language advantage that these mainly English speaking countries have over the EU with its diverse languages, make the skills of migrants more transferable to the host labor market. Thus, selective immigration policies in these countries dominate other immigration schemes and are complemented by sound labor market opportunities.

Given these observations, it is unlikely that the EU will compensate her emigration of researchers and other skilled people as well as her skills gaps by immigration of highly skilled people. The EU has to be more realistic and acknowledge that it will take quite some time to change the trend of lower skilled immigration. It will also be necessary to intensify efforts to 41