Title (eng)
Surveying irregular migrants: Challenges and approaches
Description (eng)
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.
Keywords (eng)
Surveying irregular migrantshard-to-count-populationsampling methodsLegal status trajectoriesData challengesMixed methods
Type (eng)
Language
[eng]
Persistent identifier
Is contained in
Title
Handbook on Irregular Migration Data. Concepts, Methods and Practices.
ISBN
978-3-903470-24-8
Editor
Denis Kierans
Albert Kraler
Publication
University of Krems Press
From page
112
To page
120
Date issued
2025-09-30
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