The Effects of Migration Policy on Migrant Selectivity and Their Labour Market Outcomes

Dijne Haaker , European University Institute

Recent debates challenge the assumption that immigration policy is uniformly restrictive. Instead, contemporary policies increasingly shape the composi- tion of inflows, targeting who migrates rather than the number of migrants. This paper investigates how policy restrictiveness affects educational selectivity—the degree to which migrants are more or less educated than peers in their origin countries—and how selectivity shapes labor market integration. I further examine whether selectivity mediates the relationship between policy and outcomes, and whether policy moderates the effect of selectivity on employment and occupational status. By connecting these three strands of research, the study addresses a gap in the literature, which often treats policy, selectivity, and integration in isolation.Using rounds 1–11 (2002–2024) of the European Social Survey (ESS) and the Barro-Lee educational attainment dataset, I measure migrant educational selectivity relative to origin country, gender, and birth cohort. Policy restrictiveness is captured via the Immigration Policies in Comparison (IMPIC) dataset, focusing on labor migration regulations. Preliminary results indicate that migrants are largely positively selected, with average selectivity percentiles around 0.78–0.79. Regression analyses show that policy restrictiveness has a small and statistically insignificant effect on educational selectivity once origin, destination, and year-of-migration fixed effects are included. Building on these findings, further analyses will explore whether selectivity mediates or interacts with policy to shape labor market outcomes, and decompose the relative contribution of policy versus origin and destination contexts.

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 Presented in Session 19. The Labor-Market Outcomes of Migrant Populations