Tuesday 14th July      Wednesday 15th July      Thursday 16th July      Friday 17th July     

Wednesday 15th July, 09:00 - 10:30 Room: L-103

Intra-EU immigration: new form of migration, new challenges for survey methodology?
Convenor	Professor Céline Teney (University of Bremen )
Coordinator 1	Professor Laurie Hanquinet (The University of York)

Session Details

Since the Maastricht treaty and the right of free movement, EU countries have been facing a growing wave of intra-EU migration. In contrast to the classical immigration waves –such as the guest workers in the 60´s and 70´s, recent intra-EU migrants tend to be highly mobile and skilled. This new form of migration has been receiving increasingly more attention from the scientific community. Above all, case and qualitative studies have boomed during the last years. By contrast, quantitative sociology –with a few exceptions- has largely overlooked this new migration phenomenon. This neglect is mainly due to the difficulty of identifying intra-EU immigrants in the receiving countries and the resulting challenges of drawing representative large-N samples of recent intra-EU movers. Indeed, EU citizens have the right to cross national borders without any registration obligations. This implies that most of the selection procedures traditionally used for sampling classical immigrants are obsolete for this new migration wave. How can we capture this freedom of move? And how can we represent and possibly map it?

With this panel, we hope to bring together quantitative sociologists who seek to study this new form of migration. We would like to discuss innovative strategies for drawing representative samples of these intra-EU migrants, these EU citizens who decide to live in another EU country, but also new exciting techniques to account for this freedom of move. We are, for instance, interested in visual techniques to map EU migrants’ movements. We are therefore welcoming contributions that present ways of sampling this specific population. Contributors are invited not only to shed light on the strengths and advantages of sampling strategies but also to discuss the shortcomings, sampling difficulties and representativity of the sample.

Paper Details

1. Sampling migrant populations using onomastic sampling – possibilities and limitations
Ms Anna Siuda (Trinity College Dublin)

The main objective of this paper is to analyse methodological challenges in sampling migrant populations, and to suggest how these difficulties may be overcome. It reports on a study which aims to examine the mobility of doctoral graduates of different nationalities. The first phase of the research focused on developing name-based sampling procedures which resulted in a representative sample. This paper argues that onomastic sampling is a cost-effective way of sampling migrant populations when there is lack of other sampling frames. Sampling challenges are presented, as well as suggestions on how to improve the accuracy of the method.

2. International migration and statistics globalization: Spain as a case of study
Ms Carmen Ródenas (Universidad de Alicante)
Ms Mónica Marti (Universidad de Alicante)

While migration has been transformed by taking advantage of globalization, the capacity of statistical sources to capture and analyze new types of mobility is declining. In this paper, we study the difficulties encountered by the different statistical sources in order to quantify the mobility, highlighting the need for the design of migration statistics to not be excluded from the phenomenon of globalization which requires links to exist between the different national statistical systems. The paper illustrates this by studying the recent Spanish emigration to Germany and Switzerland, using national and international statistical sources.

3. The use of resident registration data for sampling German emigrants and remigrants
Dr Friedrich Scheller (University of Duisburg Essen, Germany)
Mr Andreas Ette (Federal Institute for Population Research, Germany)
Dr Lenore Sauer (Federal Institute for Population Research, Germany)

The pilot project ‘International Mobil’ (internationally mobile) aimed at gaining more insight into the migration processes of German citizens as well as the prospects of the applied innovative methodology. Using resident register data, addresses of German citizens who live abroad and had unregistered or who had re-registered after having moved back to Germany in the year of 2013 could be obtained. Participants were contacted by post and asked to answer an online survey. Detailed non-response analyses will be presented as well as further experience made with the combined approach of register based postal contact and an onlin survey.