THESIMTowards Harmonised European

Statistics of International Migration

Nicolas Perrin perrin@sped.ucl.ac.be Michel Poulain poulain@sped.ucl.ac.be

GéDAP/UCL

Context of the project

EU is facing an urgent need for better statistics on migration and asylum to support the development of a common EU migration policy

International migration statistics are among the less reliable statistics

A forthcoming EU regulation on international migration and asylum statistics will come into force

=> Within the 6th Framework Programme for Research, THESIM has been selected in order to:

Support the implementation of the regulation Help countries to fulfill their tasks

Organisationof the THESIM consortium

Austria (ICMPD) Belgium (UCL), coordinator Estonia (EKDK) France (INED) Italy (ICSTAT) Netherlands (NIDI) Poland (CEFMR)

THESIM objectives

Compare definitions and concepts related to international migration

Analyse available data in order to see What the data reveals Where are the main problems in terms of

reliability and comparability Integrate data on asylum with data on flows and

stocks Describe and analyse efforts done on bilateral

and international levels Propose pratical recommendations in order to

improve the situation

Expected outputs and deliverables

An update of the statistical documentation will be available soon (January) for each country concerning:

Legal migrations Immigrations Emigrations Stocks of foreign populations Residence permits Acquisitions of citizenship Illegal migration (partially / CIREFI data)

Thematic reports Comparability of CIREFI data Links between legal and illegal migrations Comparisons of international database…