How does the EU square the seemingly contradictory objectives of bringing about less migration - its current approach to the refugee crisis - and more migration, which is its current response to the Union's demographic deficit? Peo Hansen explores how this might be resolved.
2023 EUSA Book Award - Honorable Mention
Current migration policy is based on a seemingly neutral accounting exercise, in which migrants contribute less in tax than they receive in welfare assistance. A "fact" that justifies increasingly restrictive asylum policies. Peo Hansen shows that this consensual cost-perspective on migration is built on a flawed economic conception of the orthodox "sound finance" doctrine prevalent in migration research and policy. By examining migration through the macroeconomic lens offered by modern monetary theory, Hansen is able to demonstrate sound finance's detrimental impact on migration policy and research, including its role in stoking the toxic debate on migration in the European Union. More importantly, Hansen's undertaking offers the tools with which both migration research and migration policy could be modernized and put on a realistic footing.
