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Give Me Your Engineers, Your Ph.D.S, Yearning To Fund My Welfare State. Fiscal Crises And High-Skilled Immigration Policies, Mariana Medina Garciadiego

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

Points systems, immigration policies in which potential immigrants make an application to enter the country and then are selected on the basis of their skills, age, and occupation, have been proven to be more successful attracting high-skilled immigrants, but very few countries have implemented them. This is particularly paradoxical since high-skilled immigrants are more beneficial in fiscal terms: they are expected to pay more taxes than low skilled immgirants, and not depend heavily on government provided welfare. My core argument is that left of center governments in liberal welfare states implement points systems during a fiscal crisis as a mean …