Government performance (Levi et al. 2009), procedural justice (Tyler, 2006), and quality of government (Rothstein, 2009) are important internal antecedents of state legitimacy. Yet, in the literature it remains unclear how external factors, such as policies of foreign countries, influence state legitimacy. Based on the previous work on system justification theory (Jost and Andrews, 2011), I argue that citizens are more likely to legitimize a state if they perceive that they cannot escape it through emigration. If regular migration is mainly determined by visa regimes a country holds with potential host countries, I expect that varying visa regimes affect the level of escapability differently. In order to test my argument, I conduct a set of experiments on a sample of US citizens. Since paying tax is argued to be a behavior that captures the concept of state legitimacy well (Levi et al. 2009), I examine the effects of experimentally manipulated restrictive visa policies on tax compliance by implementing an experimental design based on a tax evasion game (Friedland et al. 1978).