Towards a More Effective Use of Irregular Migration Data in Policymaking

Concerns around irregular migration have dominated media headlines across Europe, shaped recent elections, and influenced historical policy initiatives such as the new Pact on Migration and Asylum. Discussions and policymaking related to irregular migration are often heavily influenced by the latest numbers and estimates of quickly changing irregular migration trends, such as the number of border crossings or apprehensions of migrants without legal status. Such data also play an important role in advocacy, the evaluation of policies, operational planning, and efforts to foster dialogue and policy innovation. But before policymakers, practitioners, researchers, nongovernmental organisation staff, and other actors use data on irregular migration, datasets are shaped by many different stakeholders, each with their own objectives and priorities. The first step in this pathway involves defining irregular migration, after which data are collected, shared, accessed, interpreted, and disseminated. In each step—from definition to dissemination—different obstacles emerge that can hinder the effective collection and use of data to help manage migration, support communities in which irregular migrants live, and reach those migrants with essential services. Obstacles that arise earlier on in this process, for example unclear or inconsistent definitions of irregular migration or issues related to data sharing and access, can create problems down the line for data users.These obstacles’ causes and impacts are many and varied. However, EU-level and national workshops and expert interviews conducted for the MIrreM project, as well as a comprehensive literature review, point to certain common challenges: Most data collection is a byproduct of ongoing operations or reflects political priorities on issues such as border security. Available datasets therefore often do not match the data needs of policymakers and other end users, and they often have data gaps that limit policy development. Unclear and inconsistent definitions of irregular migration, meanwhile, increase the risk of data being misinterpreted and limit comparability over time and across geographies. Datasets on irregular migration also frequently do not include key information about how the data were collected and any associated data quality issues. At the same time, many actors using data on irregular migration lack the data literacy and expertise to properly assess a dataset’s quality and to interpret its...