Thesis

42 Chapter 3 Force Survey (EU-LFS) and the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC). Besides Eurostat, there are a number of useful sources for aggregate and individual level data on migration that can provide insights into key trends in international migration. To start, the OECD has three comprehensive databases on migration; (1) OECD: International Migration database, (2) Database on Immigrants in OECD countries ‘DIOC’, and (3) Database on Immigrants in OECD countries and non-OECD Countries ‘DIOC-E’ – which between them provide comparative information on migration stocks and flows, as well as a broad range of demographic and labour market characteristics of immigrants. Other good sources for macro-level indicators on migration are the World Bank’s DataBank, the UN Global Migration Database by UNDESA, the UN Statistics Division: International Migration data, the UNHCR Population Statistics database, and the publicly available Community Demographic Model International Migration (CDM-IM) dataset (Nawrotzki & Jiang, 2014). More specific databases include the Asylum Support Office (EASO) for data on asylum seekers, the IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix (DTM) for displaced persons, FRONTEX: Irregular Migration Research Database for irregular migration, and for migrants who have gone missing in the process of migration there is the IOM Missing Migrants Project. In addition, there have been increasing efforts to construct unique datasets on patterns of migration and national migration policies that fill particular research gaps, however these are not always open access and can be quite specific. Notable efforts by researchers include Fitzgerald et al. (2014) who constructed an extensive database on bilateral migration flows for their paper ‘Defying the Law of Gravity’ and the research project Determinants of International Migration (DEMIG) that compiled data on migration flows, policies, and visas to track migration policy changes around the world (de Haas et al., 2015). There is also the International Migration Policy And Law Analysis (IMPALA) Database, which is a is a cross-national and cross-institutional project on comparative immigration policy (Beine et al., 2015). Additionally, the Migrant Integration Policy Index (MIPEX) records and codes policies on the integration of international migrants (Huddleston et al., 2015) and (de Haas et al., 2015) code the restrictiveness of immigration policies. However, there are still a number of limitations to currently available migration data ensuring a number of ‘black boxes’ in migration research still exist. 3.4 Limitations of current data on migration 3.4.1 Who is a migrant? In 1998, the United Nations Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration broadly defined an international migrant as “any person who changes his or her country of usual residence” (UN-DESA, 2015, p. 1), which encompasses a wide variety of international movements. The UN also adopted a time criterion to distinguish between long-term and short-

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