door.donau-uni.ac.at o:5692 DOI 10.48341/g31s-vq79-10 Surveying irregular migrants: Challenges and approaches Key points • Irregular migrants are difficult to capture in statistics because of their absence from official sampling frames, mobility, and fear of detection. Surveying them requires tailored approaches, including non-probability sampling, trust-building strategies and ethical safeguards. • This chapter reviews three types of surveys that can yield data on irregular migrants: those that explicitly include them in the sampling design, those that target applicants of regularisation programmes, and retrospective surveys that reconstruct past legal trajectories. • Drawing on examples from France, Italy, Spain and the United States, this chapter shows how innovative designs and context-specific adaptations can improve coverage and data quality. • Each approach has its own strengths and limitations. A combination of methods, applied thoughtfully, is needed to strengthen the evidence base and support more accurate data collection and analysis. eng Surveying irregular migrants hard-to-count-population sampling methods Legal status trajectories Data challenges Mixed methods 2025-09-30T11:25:54.847Z LOMv1.0 Author BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Molinari;Rocco; FN:Rocco Molinari X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7403-0075 END:VCARD BEGIN:VCARD VERSION:3.0 N:Ortensi;Livia Elisa; FN:Livia Elisa Ortensi X-ORCID:https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1163-8440 END:VCARD https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/scheme https://w3id.org/kim/hcrt/text Textdokument Text LOMv1.0 yes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0 application/pdf 372284 https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/o:5692 https://door.donau-uni.ac.at/api/object/o:5692/thumbnail LOMv1.0 discipline