Immigration Policies in the EU: Failure or Success? Evidences from Italy

This work aims to study the effectiveness of migration policies empirically measuring if policies shape immigration and on what extent they can be considered restrictive. Secondly, we intend to explore how much migration policies, among other factors, have an impact on migration inflows. Our study focuses on Italy over the period 1990-2012, as one of major Mediterranean immigration countries. Immigration policy effectiveness can be assessed using two different methodologies: analyzing legal texts and using policy "outcome" measures. We will adopt the former methodology as legal texts are available to the public and they can be compared through ad hoc built indicators.