There have been calls in the international community for improved quality and availability of migration statistics for several decades. As with any other area of policy domain, the data on migration ought to be the foundation for informed decisions, but it’s not always the case.
That’s crucial anytime there is a displacement crisis, like the ones happening across the European continent. Individuals and families from places like Afghanistan and Syria put their lives at risk as they flee violence and conflict, hoping for a better life.
Timely, accurate statistics are necessary to give these migrants effective assistance, so that common misperceptions can be countered, as they often just postpone humanitarian and political responses that are so urgently needed.
How does migration data even matter? Migration statistics prove crucial to the design and implementation of sensible and practical migration policies. They’re critical if migration is ever to get mainlined into the planning for national development and growth, as the impact of migration on a particular country is assessed. It’s also a chance to look at how development conversely impacts migration, as well as how policies might shape the behavior of migrants. If a nation doesn’t have robust migration statistics, then it can’t seriously plan how it might allocate its resources, such as how it might provide assistance to needy migrants or asylum seekers.
Even though the data available on global migration isn’t as poor as is often claimed, there’s a definitive need to improve the data that gets collected through traditional sources while also putting emphasis on the substantial potential that ‘big data‘ might provide in terms of innovation. There are a number of recent developments here that offer encouragement and even grounds for optimism.
At the time of writing, the primary sources of international migration data are sample surveys (like labor-force surveys), administrative sources (like population registers), and national population censuses. Every one of these sources comes with its own benefits and drawbacks. A population census is useful in the measurement of how many international migrants there might be at that snapshot in time, but the infrequency of them makes them less reliable for informing policy at other moments. An administrative source, on the other hand, might help measure the migration flow out or in of a particular nation within a given period, but they tend to register events more than people, so they’re not as reliable. Surveys are more useful in gauging how migration impacts aspects such as the financial situations of households or labor conditions for migrants. These do come with a serious price tag and also present a number of challenges in regards to methodology.
Having said all this, the ability that many nations have to produce robust migration statistics is certainly enhanced. However, many substantial gaps are still present, especially in many developing countries. For example, sub-Saharan Africa has 49 nations, but only a dozen of them have had an official census within the last decade. Countries struggling with the difficulties of development only have a limited pool of resources to draw from, and so there’s not much they can allocate towards compiling statistics. Further compounding matters, the data that does get collected isn’t typically shared with the numerous agencies that are responsible for collecting migration data.
Building up the capacity of countries to collect and also manage this data is truly essential. In the meantime, is it possible to fill in the gaps by using innovative data sources to complement what’s already out there?
At the moment, more than 7 billion mobile phones are active around the world, and five out of seven of them are in currently developing countries. The penetration of mobile phones is rapid, especially on the continents of Africa and Asia, where the Internet is spreading like wildfire. All of this means that an unprecedented amount of data is getting generated each time someone makes a phone call, pays for something online or uses social media. This gigantic and complicated amount of information is what’s referred to as ‘big data‘.
A number of studies already show how this data could be potentially relevant for analysing migration circumstances around the world. Call records for mobile phones have already been used in tracking human displacement following a natural disaster since they include details of the location being called from and who is receiving. Similarly, these records also have seen use in inferring migration patterns inside a single country. Numerous recent studies have looked at repeat logins to a common website or even email IP addresses to gauge the flow of migration. Since a lot of user activity through social media is now also geolocated, it creates the possibility of using statistical modelling to estimate migration trends.
The robust potential that big data offers as a possible complementary source of new migration statistics is daunting, however. According to immigrationsolutions.sg serious issues present themselves in terms of privacy concerns and ethical quandaries. When this sort of information gets into the wrong hands, it might be used for things like government surveillance, seriously implicating civil liberties and personal freedoms. Practitioners, researchers, and policymakers have to work together to create the appropriate legal, legislative, and regulatory framework involving both the collection and proper use of such data.
The so-called ‘digital divide’ across various nations is one that is very real and growing every year. Big data often refers to how many smartphone and Internet users there are, and they don’t always prove a representative sample of their larger population. Extracting valuable meanings from data like that still faces numerous technical and analytical challenges.
There’s a long road ahead if innovative data sources are going to see systemic and effective use in studies of global migration populations and patterns. On the other hand, it’s a conversation that’s long overdue and needs to happen.
