Data on Migration and Migrant Health

Data on Migration and Migrant Health
Migration Data
Migration data form a vital part of the basis for formulating,
implementing and evaluating migration related
policies. Such data also assist in protecting migrants,
in integrating migration issues into national development
planning and in formulating target policies to
reduce migration pressures (UNFPA/IMP 2004). The
lack of migration data poses a major obstacle to developing
effective migration policy and legislation and to
sharing information amongst countries. The UNSD has
issued guidelines and recommendations on concepts
and methods to help countries in the collection and
dissemination of their data. These recommendations
are meant to improve the quality of data and promote
the application of common definitions and concepts by
countries to enhance the comparability of data internationally.
Some of the obstacles to collecting comprehensive,
accurate and timely migration data are associated
with:
• lack of specific and compatible definitions and poor
comparability of data sources
• operational problems of how data are retrieved including the incompleteness of information over
time, and
• political motivations that may influence how statistics are reported within and among governments.
In addition, some categories of migration data are
particularly difficult to calculate or estimate. These
include numbers relating to irregular migration, temporary/
return migration and the gender dimension of migration. The fact that there is no single source of data
to provide comprehensive figures on migration serves to make the situation more difficult. Administrative registers such as population registers, register of foreigners, residence permits, work permits, application for asylum and exit permits as well as border collection, census data and household surveys have been recommended as data sources. Most of these methods, however, have shortcomings. For instance, although residency
permits constitute an effective way of counting the number of non-citizens at a given time, they often
reflect the number of newcomers rather than the totality of persons with a migration background living in
the country. Additionally, residency permits often no longer apply within free-trade areas and may therefore not be useful for data collection on particular nationalities in certain regions.