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On the institutional design of burden sharing when financing external border enforcement in the EU

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Abstract

Illegal immigration affects not only EU member states adjacent, but also those distant from the Mediterranean Sea due to open internal borders and intra-EU onward migration. Member states without a direct influx of illegal immigrants may therefore free-ride on border countries’ enforcement efforts, leading to a sub-optimal level of border control when immigration policy remains uncoordinated. By applying a numerical example, we show that an expected externality mechanism leads to voluntary preference revelation with respect to immigration policy under several (but not all) scenarios, thereby avoiding strategic behavior in the regular negotiation process. This policy measure requires, however, the EU Commission to take on a very active role as moderator between member states (rather than as legislator).

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Notes

  1. Fortunately for the EU, the enormous outflow of Arabs during these events lasted only for a few weeks. This, however, meant at the same time that policy makers did (and do) not feel a pressing need to finally reform EU immigration policies. Our contribution can therefore also be seen as an attempt to speed up the necessary debate by sketching a new framework for reform.

  2. Similar flows can also be observed at other EU external borders. For instance, illegal immigrants may follow the ‘Central Eastern European route’ (e.g., from Ukraine to Slovakia) or the ‘South Eastern European route’ (e.g., from Turkey to Greece).

  3. According to Regulation (EC) No 562/2006 EU member states are obliged to remove all obstacles to fluid traffic flow at road crossing-points at internal borders. A reintroduction of border controls is exceptionally possible in the case of a serious threat to public policy or internal security and for a limited period of no more than thirty days.

  4. Except for the study by Chiuri et al. (2007), empirical evidence on the issue of onward migration by illegal immigrants is largely missing due to the clandestine nature of these movements. In general, authorities involved with fighting illegal immigration in the EU seem to acknowledge that illegal immigrants to the EU do not always stay in their country of first arrival but move on (cf., e.g., Frontex 2010; for the related case of asylum seekers, cf. European Commission 2010)). For our purposes, we therefore deduce the relevance of this issue from the observed political struggle within the EU on this issue. Alternatively, our approach may also be interpreted as an exercise to highlight the consequences of increasing levels of onward migration and possible strategies to deal with illegal immigration in an EU context.

  5. The Southern EU member states have indeed spent very substantial resources on border enforcement in recent years. For instance, between 1995 and 2000 the Spanish Guardia Civil increased the number of vessels from 19 to 50, the personnel in naval services from 125 to 728 and the number of helicopters from 20 to 36 (cf. Lutterbeck 2006). Similar increases can be seen for Italy’s Guardia Di Finanza. In both countries, this additional equiment is used almost entirely for fighting illegal immigration via the Mediterranean Sea.

  6. For instance, Germany is surrounded entirely by Schengen member countries. Its only ‘external’ borders are therefore international airports and sea harbors. According to Bundespolizeipräsidium (2011) there were 4.057 discovered attempts of illegal entry to Germany from the top-15 source countries of illegal immigrants in 2010. In most cases (96 %) entries were attempted at the airports. For comparison, note that the total number of discovered illegal entries was 11.433 persons. Relative to total population size the German numbers are small when compared to the observed inflows to Southern EU member states.

  7. Whether weak efforts to reduce illegal immigration are in fact a problem is disputed. From a human-rights perspective the ‘securitization’ of ‘ Fortress Europe’ is considered a highly problematic policy (for further discussions, see Haake et al. 2010 and Huysmans 2000).

  8. According to Calleya and Lutterbeck (2008), burden-sharing of central and Northern member states with frontline countries facing a disproportionately large influx of irregular immigrants is extremely limited. In the case of Malta, voluntary resettlement programmes for refugees from Malta to other EU countries range between 10 and 30 refugees per year going to The Netherlands, Germany and a few other countries, which is around one percent of annual inflows of illegal immigrants to Malta.

  9. This relates to issues covered under Articles 62–64 TEC (now Articles 77–79 TFEU), i.e., ‘border controls, asylum and immigration’. The border agency Frontex is formally an exception to this rule, as it is legally designed as an ‘EC first pillar institution’. However, the tasks undertaken are not legally defined and member states are not under legal obligation to collaborate (Carrera 2007).

  10. Note that the term ‘transfer’ or ‘side payment’ refers to net payments through the common EU fund, given that this is the typical procedure to redistribute resources between member states of the EU.

  11. In an alternative setting, Krieger and Minter (2007) and Mayr et al. (2012) investigate a scenario in which illegal immigrants, after entering the country and because of fear of detection, wait until they are legalized before they move to another member state.

  12. This Type of utility function implies that a country’s willingness to pay for the public good is unaffected by its social product or total tax revenues net of the contribution to financing the public good. This appears to be a reasonable assumption in this context as necessary enforcement spending is probably negligible relative to GDP.

  13. Particularly relevant for the European countries appears to be the influence on the welfare state. Algan and Cahuc (2009) named the ‘public spiritedness’ of citizens as an important feature of the efficiency of welfare instruments. This public spiritedness might be negatively influenced by illegal immigration.

  14. Sinn (2001) shows that a child generates a positive externality of €90.000 to the German society.

  15. Using the model from the previous section, perfect information refers to the case that each country has only one possible Type t i .

  16. Here, we implicitly assume an interior solution of the optimization problem.

  17. For an overview of the expected externality mechanism and on mechansim design in general, cf. Maskin and Sjöström (2002) or Jackson (2001). An intuitive application of mechanism design to the provision of environmental protection offers Emons (1994).

  18. We implicitly apply a direct mechanism, where actors directly report their preferences to the authority. Other, more complex institutional arrangements are also conceivable but according to the revelation principle of Dasgupta et al. (1979) each of them can be mimicked by a direct mechanism.

  19. Cf. also section 23.D in Mas-Colell et al. (1995).

  20. For a classification of the different routes, cf. https://www.imap-migration.org/.

  21. González-Enríquez (2009) shows that migration streams from Morocco to the mainland of Spain and the Canary Island have become weaker since the SIVE surveillance system was introduced and a readmission agreement with Morocco was signed in 2004.

  22. Source: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0909/p04s01-woeu.html.

  23. Source: http://www.zdk.de/salzkoerner/salzkorn.php?id=361&page=1.

  24. According to Calleya and Lutterbeck (2008, p. 1), “on a per capita basis Malta has thus experienced one of the largest—if not the largest—influx of undocumented immigrants among EU countries over recent years”.

  25. The common EU agency Frontex (2011, p. 29) reports that “(s)everal Member States reported cases of migrants who entered the EU illegally, attempting to reach their final destination, often a western Member State, and only claiming asylum if apprehended by border guard authorities or other law enforcement authorities.” For the main routes of internal EU migration of illegal immigrants, cf., e.g., Frontex (2010).

  26. In 2007, Malta had an active working population of only 166.000 persons compared to 41.8 million in Germany.

  27. Note, however, that these hypothetical numbers are unlikely to occur in the case of Malta. First, Malta is an island and onward migrants cannot easily move on to the EU mainland. Second, Malta is—by and large—adhering to European agreements by trying to keep illegal immigrants on its soil, e.g., by detaining, returning or integrating this group of people. However, as discussed in Mayr et al. (2012), Malta could—without infringing European treaties—grant an amnesty to illegal immigrants giving them the opportunity to leave the place without restrictions after a certain waiting time.

  28. These numbers are taken from a survey conducted in 2003 by Chiuri et al. (2007) who asked 920 illegal immigrants in Italy for their intended final destination (75 % named Italy, 10 % Germany and 5 % France). For Malta no such information is available. Chiuri et al. (2007, table 11) also find that only 15 % of all interviewed illegal immigrants intend to stay for a short time of two years or less. The rest plans to stay longer or answered “don’t know”.

  29. The Mathematica output is available from the authors upon request.

  30. Note that in the asymmetric case (with one country having a high and the other country a low preference) the enforcement level is not the same for the different combinations (5.17 vs. 5.97). This is due to the fact that the countries differ in labor force and in the rates of receiving onward migrants. Therefore the optimal enforcement level is higher when interior country 2 has a high preference and interior country 2 has a low preference (recall that country 2 receives more illegal migrants than country 3).

  31. More precisely, the utility change is the difference between total utility when participating in the mechanism and total utility when the enforcement level is decentrally chosen by the border country.

  32. According to Tables 7 and 9 (included in the Appendix) voluntary participation of the small border country decreases with migratory pressure. While for the case of \(\bar{M}=1\) even the ex-post participation constraint is fulfilled, neither ex-post participation nor interim participation is fulfilled in case of \(\bar{M}=10\).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany

    Claus-Jochen Haake

  2. Department of Economics, University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Tim Krieger & Steffen Minter

Authors
  1. Claus-Jochen Haake
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  2. Tim Krieger
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  3. Steffen Minter
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Steffen Minter.

Additional information

The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for very helpful comments and suggestions.

Appendix

Appendix

1.1 Scenario 1: Small border country

Case 1: Migration pressure amounts to \({\bar{M}=1}\)

Table 6 Welfare maximizing enforcement level for \(\bar{M}=1\)
Full size table

Decentrally chosen enforcement level in the status quo: E = 0

Table 7 Payments and utility differentials
Full size table

Case 2: Migration pressure amounts to \({\bar{M}=10}\)

Table 8 Welfare maximizing enforcement level for \(\bar{M}=10\)
Full size table

Decentrally chosen enforcement level in the status quo: E = 0,9

Table 9 Payments and utility differentials
Full size table

1.2 Scenario 2: Large border country

Case 1: Migration pressure amounts to \({\bar{M}=1}\)

Table 10 Welfare maximizing enforcement level for \(\bar{M}=1\)
Full size table

Decentrally chosen enforcement level in the status quo: E = 0,61

Table 11 Payments and utility differentials
Full size table

Case 2: Migration pressure amounts to \({\bar{M}=10}\)

Table 12 Welfare maximizing enforcement level for \(\bar{M}=10\)
Full size table

Decentrally chosen enforcement level in the status quo: E = 12,6

Table 13 Payments and utility differentials
Full size table

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Haake, CJ., Krieger, T. & Minter, S. On the institutional design of burden sharing when financing external border enforcement in the EU. Int Econ Econ Policy 10, 583–612 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10368-012-0226-3

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