The Devil Is in the Detail: Measuring Intra-EU Labour Migration 45 labour migration is particularly difficult to collect, record, and disseminate because of the complex nature of human movement and the nature of the single market. The result is that many types of intra-EU mobility are miscounted or not even counted at all by official statistics creating an invisible population (de Beer et al., 2010). This reality means that migration statistics are fallible and consequently operationalising migration as a dependent or independent variable can be complicated (de Beer et al., 2010; Eurostat, 2017c; Lemaitre, 2005). As a result, many studies looking to answer research questions about various facets of intra-EU labour migration may use the aggregate measure of intra-EU migration as a proxy for labour migration instead, reshape the research question to avoid directly discussing labour migration specifically, or analyse the topic qualitatively. 3.4.3 Disaggregating migration statistics The ability to disaggregate international migration statistics depends on where the comes from. Statistics such as those provided by the OECD and Eurostat are gathered from a variety of sources depending on the reporting country. Most EU countries base their migration statistics on census data and various administrative sources such as population registers, temporary or permanent residence permits, work permits, health insurance registers, and tax registers. Some also use household sample surveys such as the EU-LFS, mirror statistics or particular estimation methods (Eurostat, 2017c; Lemaitre, 2005). In Germany and the Netherlands, statistics on immigrants are generated from population registers collected at the municipal level. Whereas the UK relies on a passenger survey because there is no official system of local registration (DeWaard et al., 2012). Each source has its own advantages and disadvantages. Producing migration statistics in the EU based upon work permits would exclude mobile citizens from the official numbers as they have free labour market access in other EU member states. Moreover, work permits may have little relation to real numbers if they include renewals or if there is a significant backlog. In the case of a census, while it is the most comprehensive way to estimate the number of immigrants, it only happens once every ten years. Acquiring detailed data on immigration beyond basic age and sex descriptors is incredibly difficult. In particular, if you wish to expand your research into types/categories of movement there is little publicly available data. One exception is inflow of asylum seekers, which is reasonably well recorded by most OECD countries. An asylum seeker is easier to define and record – the 1950 Geneva Convention that provides an international, legal definition of a refugee and the number of asylum applicants is straightforward to count because an asylum seeker must interact with the authorities in their host nation. However, even this can vary between country, some asylum seekers are only counted once they receive refugee status while others are counted earlier in the process (de Beer et al., 2010).
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