Summary
The IMPIC Project offers sophisticated quantitative indices to assess immigration policies across time, countries, and policy fields, focusing on 33 OECD countries from 1980 to 2018. The current IMPIC datasets (version 2) cover immigration policies, which encompass government intentions and actions concerning the selection, admission, settlement, and deportation of foreign citizens within a country. IMPIC includes four immigration policy fields related to why states accept immigrants: labour migration (economic), family reunification (social), asylum/refugees (humanitarian), and co-ethnics (cultural). The dataset specifically covers legal regulations, excluding implementation details. The data is further disaggregated into two dimensions. The first dimension looks at states’ regulations, or binding legal provisions that create or constrain rights for immigration, and also controls, or mechanisms that monitor whether immigration policies are followed (Schmid and Helbling 2016). The group of control mechanisms includes various aspects relating to irregular migration such as requirements for airlines to control visa or sanctions for employing irregular migrants. The second dimension looks at states’ regulations and controls for immigration not only at their borders (external regulations and controls), but also within their territories (internal regulations and controls). As a last differentiation, the IMPIC dataset disaggregates external and internal regulations into four sub-dimensions related to immigrant eligibility requirements, conditions, security of status and rights. The second version, published in 2024, included an update for the main dataset IMPIC2024, as well as new data on Anti-discrimination legislation.
Policy areas
Labour (economic), family reunification (social), asylum/refugees (humanitarian), and co-ethnics (cultural) migration. Covers both legal regulation and mechanism that monitor whether these regulations are followed.
Countries
Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Switzerland, Chile, Czech Republic, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, United Kingdom, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Iceland, Israel, Italy, Japan, South Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norfolk Island, Netherlands, Norway, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Sweden, Turkey, and United States.
Years
1980-2018