Foreign Aid Allocation as Migration Control: Root Causes or Migration Management?

In a highly interdependent world, wealthy industrialized countries are directly affected by economic and social conditions elsewhere by way of “spillovers” such as migration. In response, these countries target development and humanitarian assistance efforts, focusing on countries from which these spillovers originate. In this paper, I extend existing scholarship on targeted development by investigating the specificity of donor aid allocation strategies. I ask whether donors vary the type of aid they allocate in response to the type of spillover they experience. Using dyadic aid and migration data on 30 donors and 126 recipient countries from 2007 to 2023, I construct proxy measures of two donor strategies for migration deterrence: an indirect root causes strategy and a direct migration management strategy. I then assess their relationship with permanent-type immigration and asylum-seeker inflows, and find that donors respond to these two types of immigration with increased allocation of both types of aid. However, they do so with different emphases, stressing the root causes approach in response to permanent-type immigration and the migration management approach in response to asylum-seeker inflows. These findings show that donors use official development assistance to simultaneously pursue multiple strategies of migration control, but are responsive to the type of immigration they experience. At a broader level, this paper demonstrates how donors vary development and humanitarian aid composition and not just quantity in response to different types of international spillovers.