48 Chapter 3 3.5.2 Identifying migrants The initial step for creating intra-EU labour migration indicators was to identify migrants. I categorise migrants as persons born outside their current country of residence (foreign-born). When data on country of birth is not available then data on foreign citizens – those with a different nationality than the country they reside in – is used9. The labour migration indicators created start in 2004 because of the way the data is presented in the EU-LFS. Prior to 2004, country of birth is labelled as either EU-28 or non-EU due to the anonymisation process undertaken by each reporting country for every individual in the survey. From 2004 onwards, the data for country of birth is presented as broad country groupings under the variable ‘COUNTRYB’. The most common groups are: ‘Native’, ‘EU15’ (pre-2004 expansion countries), ‘NMS10’ (2004 expansion countries), ‘NMS3’ (Bulgaria, Romania, and Croatia), ‘EFTA’ (European Free Trade Association), ‘Other Europe’, ‘North Africa’, ‘Other Africa’, ‘Near and Middle East’, ‘East Asia’, ‘South and South East Asia’, ‘North America’, ‘Central America and the Caribbean’, ‘South America’, ‘Australia and Oceania’. Some countries reduce these groups into even broader categories because of concerns regarding anonymisation. For example, ‘NMS10’ and ‘NMS3’ are combined together under the category ‘NMS13’. For the indicators, if ‘NMS13’ is not available then we combine the two separate figures for ‘NMS10’ and ‘NMS3’ to create an indicator for Central and Eastern European migration (EU13). In this case, the two intra-EU labour migration indicators are not affected by the groupings. However, for two countries one change in the groupings does have a slight bearing, in Finland and France, the EFTA countries (Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein) are counted in ‘Other Europe’. Thus, for Finland and France, EFTA migration is missing from the EU-15 & EFTA labour migration indicator. 3.5.3 Identifying labour migrants I identify labour migrants through selecting those who are both foreignborn and whose employment status is either employed or unemployed using the variable ‘ILOSTAT’10. Using the broad country groups noted earlier, we then create intra-EU labour migration indicators for 16 European countries (EU-15 and Switzerland). I use the information on country of birth and labour force status (employed and unemployed) to identify labour migrants from the EU-15 & EFTA and EU-13 countries. The variable ILOSTAT provides the labour force status of the individual observations. It is split into five categories; employed, unemployed, inactive, compulsory 9 This is the case for Germany only as it withholds data on country of birth. 10 Regarding employment status, there are three mutually exclusive and exhaustive groups − employed, unemployed, and economically inactive − we exclude the category ‘inactive’ as they are neither employed nor searching for work.
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