Why Should the Authority Care about the Immigration Policy Uncertainty?

Abstract

Terrorist attacks, which have been intensified by migration recently, have a significant adverse impact on social and economic development. In this paper, we utilize Poisson regression model to explore the relationship between migration fear, migration policy uncertainty, and terrorist attack. Empirical results show that migration policy uncertainty has a significant positive impact on the occurrence of terrorist attacks, which displays similarity in different sample countries. However, there is a substantial difference in the effect of the migration fear on the terrorist attack, the impact of migration fear on the terrorist attacks is positive in traditional migration country (such as the U.S.), which is opposite with European migration countries. This paper further separates the full sample into two subsamples by using 9.11 Attack as exogenous structural break and concludes that after the 9.11 Attack, the impact of migration fear on terrorist attack increases and the result of migration policy uncertainty on terrorist attack decreases, which is consistent with stringent immigration censorship system in the U.S. Therefore, to strengthen international security, we should give more attention to the migration fear and the uncertainty of immigration policy.