"In addition to not contributing taxes, undocumented workers are often more involved in illegal activities. During the last thirty years, why have governments rejected a quarter of all applications for the regularization of immigrants? That is the principal question." Francesco Magris, a professor at the University François Rabelais, Tours, used these words at a seminar which was organized by the Center for International Development (NCID) at the University of Navarra.

In his presentation, Professor Magris suggested that governments devote a lot of resources to limiting the flow of illegal immigrants. "However, once [a country] has accumulated a large number of them, there is a strong incentive to grant tax amnesties, given that regularization of undocumented workers leads to an increase in tax revenues," he said.

Tax amnesty for wealthiest immigrants

Magris stressed that governments are more interested in taxing immigrants with a high income and expelling the poorer ones: The latter "are faced with a dilemma, since the amnesty can be used to detain and deport them. If they know in advance that their application for residence will be rejected, then they might prefer not to process documents through the amnesty."

As an example, he mentioned the Italian government's case: "It announced an amnesty that would increase the estimated tax revenues from 1.2 to 1.6 billion euros, as a result of 750,000 regularizations. Yet, only 295,126 people applied for the documentation because many of them did not trust that the executive wanted to formalize their decision," he stressed. In that regard, he concluded that "this type of amnesty ends up being applied only to the richest immigrants."