Document Type
Capstone Project
Publication Date
Spring 5-21-2025
Publication Title
Brookings Public Policy Minor Culminating Project
First page number:
1
Last page number:
36
Abstract
This policy brief analyzes the growing use of transactional migration agreements (TMAs) by receiving democracies—bilateral arrangements that exchange financial or diplomatic concessions for the external enforcement of migration control. While politically expedient, TMAs often generate long-term strategic liabilities: they reduce state control over enforcement outcomes, expose receiving states to coercive leverage by partner states, and weaken normative commitments to transparency and rights protection. Using analytic process tracing and formal modeling, this paper identifies four recurring mechanisms by which TMAs evolve into systems of asymmetric dependence. It then evaluates three alternative policy frameworks—Exit Doctrine, Legal Category Reform, and a Structured Conditionality Regime—against five criteria: policy durability, administrative implementability, normative capital preservation, responsiveness to structural drivers, and political feasibility. Among them, the Structured Conditionality Regime offers the most viable path forward: it aligns with current executive priorities by tying cooperation to measurable outcomes, limiting open-ended aid commitments, and restoring control over migration enforcement without requiring multilateral consensus.
Keywords
Administrative Implementability; Audience Costs; Crisis Framing; Forced Migration; Irregular Migration; Migration Drivers; Migration Governance; Normative Capital; Opportunist Coercion; Process Tracing; Receiving States; Transactional Migration Agreements; Transit States
Disciplines
American Politics | Higher Education | International and Area Studies | International Relations | Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration | Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation | Public Affairs | Public Policy | Social Policy | Urban Studies
File Format
File Size
660 KB
Language
English
Rights
IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Repository Citation
Ramos, O.
(2025).
Reassessing Policy Responses to Irregular Migration in Receiving Democracies: A Process-Tracing Analysis of Transactional Migration Governance.
Brookings Public Policy Minor Culminating Project
1-36.
Available at:
https://digitalscholarship.unlv.edu/brookings_capstone_studentpapers/25
Included in
American Politics Commons, Higher Education Commons, International and Area Studies Commons, International Relations Commons, Other Public Affairs, Public Policy and Public Administration Commons, Policy Design, Analysis, and Evaluation Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Public Policy Commons, Social Policy Commons, Urban Studies Commons
