The Devil Is in the Detail: Measuring Intra-EU Labour Migration 41 that intra-EU labour immigration is associated with chauvinistic attitudes towards welfare state spending, particularly amongst women. However, the study is unable to directly measure labour migration and so uses the terms intra-EU immigration, intra-EU migrant workers, and intra-EU labour immigration interchangeably even though there is a difference between family and labour migrants, between asylum seekers and students, for example. By providing more detailed indicators for these groups, authors should be better equipped to draw conclusions about them without having to assume that all intra-EU movement is labour migration. In the cases where data specifically on labour migrants is used, it is usually only for a single country or for a single year, and the data has often been collected specially. For example, in Galgóczi, Leschke and Watt (2009) the chapters all deal with individual, country-specific case studies, and each use a variety of different sources to construct their information on labour migration (e.g. national statistics, work permits, and the EU-LFS). In the case of Engbersen et al. (2013), they conducted face-to-face surveys of 654 labour migrants in the Netherlands from Poland, Bulgaria and Romania. Crucially, these papers all study the intended population of labour migrants, but they may have issues of external validity. Details regarding who is a mobile citizen are useful for countries looking to take a balanced approach towards discussing and managing intra-EU migration. Various social and economic outcomes of EU mobile citizens in different EU member states could be partially explained by the labour market outcomes of these groups and their different distributions and variations across the EU (Lemaitre et al., 2007). For the EU, a comprehensive evidence base is important because of the potential heterogeneous impact intra-EU movement has on Member States and its ability to undermine solidarity. Data that cannot be broken down only has a limited number of uses (Santamaria & Vespe, 2018) and the ability to disaggregate by these categories of migration is useful for both researchers and policy-makers. Moreover, for researchers aiming to draw conclusions on intra-EU labour migration, the use of the currently available overall flow and stock statistics could lead to over-simplification. 3.3 Current migration datasets A key source of European migration data for scholars is Eurostat where key international migration statistics are available over a number of years. EU member states are expected to provide Eurostat with data on the number of immigrants disaggregated by citizenship, country of birth, previous usual residence, age, and sex. Eurostat data is mostly provided by EU member states’ National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) and estimated from a number of large household sample surveys, such as the European Union Labour
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