The Use of Data on Irregular Migration in Policymaking

The demand for more and better data have accompanied academic and policy debates on migration for at least the past two decades, with the field of irregular migration being no exception. However, more than in other areas there are profound disagreements over what would constitute valid or reliable indicators. Beyond methodological concerns, this also reflects diverging views on frames to be invoked, categorisations and related normative claims. Statistics not only serve as neutral evidence of the existence of a phenomenon and its quantity, but they also have a performative role and the power to push specific dimensions of a phenomenon into the limelight and thus have the potential to change both public perceptions and policies and are often turned into benchmarks of the success or failure of particular policies in a given area (see more broadly Boswell, 2018). Statistics about border apprehensions or migrant fatalities, for instance, feature in news cycles on nearly a daily basis (Heller & Pécoud, 2020). While there is a growing body of literature reflecting on these broader potentials of quantitative data, there is relatively limited knowledge about how data are used or demanded by specific stakeholders and transformed into ‘evidence’. This paper attempts to fill this void by asking (1) why certain data on irregular migration are produced in the first place and the purposes they are intended to serve, (2) how data are actually used by different stakeholders; and (3) for which topics stakeholders see a need for quantitative indicators and why.