Sale of visas: a smuggler's final song?

Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful at eliminating smugglers by eroding their profits but it also increases immigration. In contrast, repression decreases migration but fuels cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we show that legalisation through selling visas in combination with repression can be used to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows. Simulations of the policy highlight the complementarities between repression and selling visas and call into question current policies

To Control Migration Flows and Defeat Human Smuggling, Sell Visas

Policymakers in most OECD countries face the challenge that they must fight people smuggling while retaining control of migration flows. Policies designed to increase border controls are not sufficient on their own; the level of enforcement that would eliminate people smuggling entirely would be extremely costly. Further, these policies have unintended consequences in the people smuggling market; they increase the fees charged by smugglers, increase reliance on their services, and increase their cartellization. By contrast, a visa-selling policy can weaken smugglers by decreasing their prices and squeezing their profits. However, eliminating people smuggling only in this way requires cheap visas and necessarily leads to a rise in the numbers of people migrating. An innovative policy of selling visas combined with enforced sanctions on employers and employees for illegal working can control migration flows and put smugglers out of business. Using the revenue generated to finance enforcement allows visa prices to be set at a high level that controls migration flows

Sale of visas : a smuggler’s final song?

Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful at eliminating human smugglers by eroding their profits but it necessarily increases immigration. In contrast, re-enforced repression decreases migration but uses the help of cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we study how legalisation and repression can be combined to eliminate human smuggling while controlling migration flows. This policy mix also has the advantage that the funds raised by visa sales can be used to finance additional investments in border and internal controls (employer sanctions and deportations). Simulations of the policy implications highlight the complementarities between repression and legalisation and call into question the current policies

Sale of Visas: a Smuggler's Final Song?

Is there a way of eliminating human smuggling? We set up a model to simultaneously determine the provision of human smuggling services and the demand from would-be migrants. A visa-selling policy may be successful in eliminating smugglers by eroding their profits, but it also increases immigration. In contrast, repression decreases migration but fuels cartelized smugglers. To overcome this trade-off we show that legalization through selling visas in combination with repression can be used to weaken human smuggling while controlling migration flows. Our results highlight the complementarities between repression and selling visas, and call into question current policies

Spatial and temporal resolution of sensor observations

Beobachtung ist ein Kernkonzept der Geoinformatik. Beobachtungen dienen bei Phänomenen wie Klimawandel, Massenbewegungen (z. B. Hangbewegungen) und demographischer Wandel zur Überwachung, Entwicklung von Modellen und Simulation dieser Erscheinungen. Auflösung ist eine zentrale Eigenschaft von Beobachtungen. Der Gebrauch von Beobachtungen unterschiedlicher Auflösung führt zu (potenziell) unterschiedlichen Entscheidungen, da die Auflösung der Beobachtungen das Erkennen von Strukturen während der Phase der Datenanalyse beeinflusst. Der Hauptbeitrag dieser Arbeit ist eine entwickelte Theorie der raum- und zeitlichen Auflösung von Beobachtungen, die sowohl auf technische Sensoren (z. B. Fotoapparat) als auch auf menschliche Sensoren anwendbar ist. Die Konsistenz der Theorie wurde anhand der Sprache Haskell evaluiert, und ihre praktische Anwendbarkeit wurde unter Einsatz von Beobachtungen des Webportals Flickr illustriert

A prescriptive approach to qualify and quantify customer value for value-based requirements engineering

Recently, customer-based product development is becoming a popular paradigm. Customer expectations and needs can be identified and transformed into requirements for product design with the help of various methods and tools. However, in many cases, these models fail to focus on the perceived value that is crucial when customers make the decision of purchasing a product. In this paper, a prescriptive approach to support value-based requirements engineering (RE) is proposed, describing the foundations, procedures and initial applications in the context of RE for commercial aircraft. An integrated set of techniques, such as means-ends analysis, part-whole analysis and multi-attribute utility theory is introduced in order to understand customer values in depth and width. Technically, this enables identifying the implicit value, structuring logically collected statements of customer expectations and performing value modelling and simulation. Additionally, it helps to put in place a system to measure customer satisfaction that is derived from the proposed approach. The approach offers significant potential to develop effective value creation strategies for the development of new product

Cirrus cloud occurrence as function of ambient relative humidity: A comparison of observations from the Southern and Northern Hemisphere midlatitudes obtained during the INCA experiment

International audienceThe occurrence frequency of cirrus clouds as function of ambient relative humidity over ice, based on in-situ observations performed during the INCA experiment, show a clear difference between the campaign carried out at Southern Hemisphere (SH) midlatitudes and the campaign carried out at Northern Hemisphere (NH) midlatitudes. At a given relative humidity above ice saturation, clouds are more frequent in the NH. At relative humidities near ice saturation, clouds defined as containing particles with sizes larger than 0.55 µm diameter and an integral number density above 0.2 cm-3 were present 70% of the time during the SH campaign, whereas clouds where present 95% of the time during the NH campaign. Using a size threshold of 1 µm diameter to define the presence of clouds result in a less frequent occurrence of 60% of the time in the SH campaign and 75% of the time in the NH campaign. The data show that the presence of particles is a common characteristic of cirrus clouds. Clouds at ice saturation defined as having crystal sizes of at least 5 µm diameter and a number density exceeding 0.001 cm-3 were present in about 80% of the time during the SH campaign, and almost 90% of the time during the NH campaign. The observations reveal a significant cloud presence fraction at humidities well below ice saturation. Local minima in the cloud presence fraction as a function of relative humidity are interpreted as systematic underestimation of cloud presence because cloud particles may become invisible to cloud probes. Based on this interpretation the data suggests that clouds in the SH form preferentially at relative humidities between 140 and 155%, whereas clouds in the NH formed at relative humidities less than 130%. A simple assumption about the probability to reach successively higher humidities in an ice supersaturated air parcel provides a model that explains the main trend of the cloud presence fraction as function of relative humidity. If adiabatic processes are assumed a cloud water content distribution can be derived from this probability model. The resulting distribution agrees well in shape compared to observations, but the observed mean cloud water content is less than expected from simply adiabatic processes

Use of the industrial property system in Colombia (2018): A supervised learning application

The purpose of this paper is to establish ways to predict the spatial distribution of the use of the intellectual property system from information on industrial property applications and grants (distinctive signs and new creations) and copyright registrations in 2018. This will be done using supervised learning algorithms applied to information on industrial property applications and grants (trademarks and new creations) and copyright registrations in 2018. Within the findings, 4 algorithms were identified with a level of explanation higher than 80%: (i) Linear Regression, with an elastic network regularization; (ii) Stochastic Gradient Descent, with Hinge loss function, Ringe regularization (L2) and a constant learning rate; (iii) Neural Networks, with 1,000 layers, with Adam’s solution algorithm and 2,000 iterations; (iv) Random Forest, with 10 tree