Migration: Integration, Impact and Interaction

Rising immigration is one of the most significant issues to have captured the public interest and public-policy debates in recent years. Yet despite awareness of the issue there has been surprisingly little economic analysis of immigration's effects and its consequences. While there has been some advancement gauging its impacts in the labour market, there are still major gaps in our understanding in this area, while many other areas of the economy, notably crime, housing, poverty, health, welfare and education remain simply bereft of economic analysis. The studies outlined here will address this lacuna and so help bring much needed information and clarity to this important debate, extending the frontier of analysis into various new directions.

The programme will use a combination of perhaps the best administrative and novel survey data sources in Europe and beyond, which allows us to address key issues at the frontier of migration research that hitherto could not be analysed. The programme offers a highly innovative research agenda, carried out by research teams from 6 NORFACE countries, all with an excellent academic track record and unique experience working with administrative and survey data. The proposal involves many new ideas that have not yet been pursued in the migration literature. Embedded within economic theoretical rigour, the research designs we propose will allow us to use innovative techniques and ideas to identify causal effects of immigration rather then associations.