Immigration, public finances and welfare in receiving countries: a France-US comparison.

Summary This thesis focuses on understanding the economic effects of immigration by comparing the cases of France and the United States. Immigration changes economic conditions. of the host country through two main channels: the labor market and public finances. Two types of approaches are proposed to study the issue: generational accounting and computable general equilibrium. This thesis first shows that the current immigration policy appears to be very neutral on fiscal balances in France. The level. The level of education of migrants is the determining variable of their impact on the economy considered. Thus, the implementation of a more selective policy on the level of education of future flows generates long-term gains. If the educational level of migrants is at the heart of their fiscal impact, then extending the analysis to the whole population leads to a reduction in fiscal imbalances due to educational progress. Second, using a computable general equilibrium model confirms these results for both countries. Contrary to the recent literature, we show a non-negligible net gain from immigration but moderate redistributive effects. The model also shows that post-war immigration to the United States has had only a small impact on macroeconomic variables, but that it increases the welfare of all the native-born cohorts considered.