Migration Statistics in Europe: A Core Component of Governance and Population Research

Abstract

State' and 'statistics' are not only related etymologically. 1 Rather, statistics represent a fundamental technique of modern government comparable to the role of law in modern societies. Like law, statistics are about procedure and standardisation. Whereas law is about standardising the exercise of power and (legal) relations amongst citizens, between citizens and the state as well as relations within the state, statistics are about knowledge necessary for such exercise of power and authority. Statistics-in James Scott's famous formulation (Scott 1998)-enable states to 'see'. They bring order to the fluid object that is a population, a territory or other objects of power by standardising and structuring social reality into discrete countable units, thereby (so Scott's Foucauldian argument goes) also transforming populations into governable subjects. Indeed, the history of statistics as a specific field of knowledge production is intricately linked to the history of the modern state and modern *The opinions of this author expressed in this chapter do not represent those of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) 1 The word statistics most probably stems from the Italian word statista meaning 'statesman' (cf. Schmidt 2005).

Sampling immigrants in the Netherlands and Germany

“…The collection of comparable, harmonised, international data becomes more important due to the salience of migration at the political level after 1989 (Kraler, Reichel, & Entzinger, 2015, p. 41). In 1989 the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), the successor of the Intergovernmental Committee for Migration (ICM), was established as expert organisation, and in 1990 the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) was expanded.…”

“…However, despite of efforts in providing guidelines, countries often differ not only in the data-collection and weighting model to reduce the non-response bias, but also in the operationalization of concepts such as migrants or minorities, and in the phrasing of the questions in their surveys, including the EU-Labor Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the EU-Survey on Income and Living Conditions (Huddleston et al, 2013, p. 33). Such concepts to define migrants may also differentiate along the perspective of interest: nationality (citizenship), origin, residence or migration history, legal status, descent and ethnicity (Kraler et al, 2015, pp. 50–51).…”

Surveying immigrants without sampling frames – evaluating the success of alternative field methods

“…Accompanying these data collection efforts, research on how to effectively collect information on immigrants through surveys has advanced as well (e.g. Beauchemin & González-Ferrer, 2011; Font & Mendez, 2013; Kraler & Reichel, 2010; Thomas, 2008). Recent studies have started looking into the main problems associated with surveying immigrants, primarily issues related to varying coverage and response rates of immigrant groups.…”

“…Sometimes the necessary information for identifying a specific sub-population is not available from the existing registers (most notably the country of birth or nationality in the case of immigrants, cf. Kraler & Reichel, 2010). There are cases when it is known that existing registers are biased and, therefore, not useful for covering the target population.…”

Sampling migrants in six European countries: how to develop a comparative design?

“…Prominent examples are the EU regulation (EC) 862/2007 on community statistics on migration and international protection, the Declaration of Zaragoza (2010) stressing the need to have common indicators on migrants, or the Task Force on Improving Migration and Migrant Data Using Surveys and Other Data (also referred to as the ‘Suitland Working Group’) as well as the recent initiative International Forum on Migration Statistics , organized under the aegis of OECD, IOM and UNDESA. In response, and in parallel to these initiatives, many European countries have made efforts to improve their national statistical infrastructure to better account for immigrant minorities (for the advancements at Eurostat see Kraler, Reichel, & Entzinger, 2015, p. 44–49).…”