The Legal Grounds of Irregular Migration: A Global Game Approach.

Summary This paper analyses the relationship between regular and irregular migration taking into account the migration network effect and the network creation mechanism. We assume that migrants can obtain a high payoff only if a critical mass of migrants is reached in the destination country. If candidates to migration receive biased signals about the economic situation of the destination country, the migrants’ decision problem can be analyzed as a standard global game. Tying the quota of regular migrants to the economic performance of countries might create large discontinuities in immigration flows, with some countries attracting the bulk of irregular migrants and the other being shunned by the migrants.