Economic Crisis and International Migration. What the EU Data Reveal?

Herm, Anne Poulain, Michel [UCL]

What was the impact of the recent economic crisis on the international migration flows for the European Union? Such crisis may have strengthened the difficulties for non-EU citizens to enter the territory of the EU while the propensity for return migration could have increased. Concerning EU citizens, the impact could be a decreased intra-European mobility and, possibly an increase of extra-European emigration flows. In this contribution we check if data accessible in international and national databases for the year 2007 up to 2009 allow confirming these assumptions. Such analysis has to be carried out very carefully as international migration data are not harmonised despite of efforts done and, they are far to be reliable. Moreover new rules of data collection enforced by the EU since 2008 may have an impact of the newly provided data. Consequently changes in trends observed in 2008 and 2009 in the context of the economic crisis must be dealt with caution as the possible impact of simultaneous changes in data collection may hamper real trends and available data could not be always useful to enlighten the effect of the economic crisis on international migration flows.