Javier Vázquez-Grenno (University of Barcelona)
Anastasia Terskaya
This paper investigates how restricting healthcare access for irregular immigrants influences international migration flows, using Spains 2012 policy reform as a quasi-experimental setting. Through difference-in-differences analysis, we find the policy not only failed to reduce but may have increased net migration flows from non-EU countries during the post-policy period (2012-2014). We confirm this finding through triple-difference estimation using Italy and Portugal as counterfactuals. Taken together, these results offer compelling causal evidence against the welfare magnet hypothesis, suggesting that: healthcare access restrictions for irregular immigrants lack deterrent effects on migration flows.