Smuggling of forced migrants to Europe: a matching model

This paper develops a matching model to analyze the smuggling market for forced migrants, building on the empirical evidence related to the smuggling of migrants from the Horn of Africa and the Middle East to Europe in the last decade. Comparative statics for the equilibrium solution reveal that coercion-based measures targeting the smugglers reduce the number of irregular migrants and smugglers at the expense of migrants’ overall welfare. Slightly increasing legal migration opportunities has the interesting feature of reducing irregular flows, without deteriorating migrants’ welfare or increasing the total number of migrants. An extremely restrictive asylum policy has similar effects in terms of the flows of irregular migrants as a quite loose one, with the largest flows of irregular migrants occurring under a “middle-range” policy.