Historical dataset showing Germany immigration statistics by year from 1990 to 2015.

It contains 5 interviews with Greek immigrants and immigrant women in Germany (2 women and 3 men), recording the post-war difficulties that led them to migration, the transition from rural life to industrial work, and the problems of returning to Greece. The purpose of the research was also to compare the post-war Greek migration to Germany with the experience of Albanian immigrants in Greece (Collection No 2). On the basis of this comparison, the students produced a radio show entitled "Journey to Infinity", which was broadcast on the then Municipal Radio.

Abstract

This dataset, a product of the Trade Team - Development Research Group, is part of a larger effort in the group to measure the extent of the brain drain as part of the International Migration and Development Program. It measures international skilled migration for the years 1975-2000.

The methodology is explained in: "Tendance de long terme des migrations internationals. Analyse à partir des 6 principaux pays recerveurs", Cécily Defoort.

This data set uses the same methodology as used in the Docquier-Marfouk data set on international migration by educational attainment. The authors use data from 6 key receiving countries in the OECD: Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the UK and the US.

It is estimated that the data represent approximately 77 percent of the world’s migrant population.

Bilateral brain drain rates are estimated based observations for every five years, during the period 1975-2000.

Geographic coverage

Australia, Canada, France, Germany, UK and US

Kind of data

Aggregate data [agg]

Mode of data collection

Other [oth]

Debates about migration are often in the news. People quote numbers about how many people are entering and leaving different countries. Governments need to plan and manage public resources based on how their own populations are changing.

Informed discussions and effective policymaking rely on good migration data. But how much do we really know about migration, and where do estimates come from?

In this article, I look at how countries and international agencies define different forms of migration, how they estimate the number of people moving in and out of countries, and how accurate these estimates are.

Migrants without legal status make up a small portion of the overall immigrant population. Most high-income countries and some middle-income ones have a solid understanding of how many immigrants live there. Tracking the exact flows of people moving in and out is trickier, but governments can reliably monitor long-term trends to understand the bigger picture.

Who is considered an international migrant? In the United Nations statistics, an international migrant is defined as “a person who moves to a country other than that of his or her usual residence for at least a year, so that the country of destination effectively becomes his or her new country of usual residence”.1

For example, an Argentinian person who spends nine months studying in the United States wouldn’t count as a long-term immigrant in the US. But an Argentinian person who moves to the US for two years would. Even if someone gains citizenship in their new country, they are still considered an immigrant in migration statistics.

The same applies in reverse for emigrants: someone leaving their home country for more than a year is considered a long-term emigrant for the country they’ve left. This does not change if they acquire citizenship in another country. Some national governments may have definitions that differ from the UN recommendations.

What about illegal migration? “Illegal migration” refers to the movement of people outside the legal rules for entering or leaving a country. There isn’t a single agreed-upon definition, but it generally involves people who breach immigration laws. Some refer to this as irregular or unauthorized migration.

There are three types of migrants who don’t have a legal immigration status. First, those who cross borders without the right legal permissions. Second, those who enter a country legally but stay after their visa or permission expires. Third, some migrants have legal permission to stay but work in violation of employment restrictions — for example, students who work more hours than their visa allows.

Tracking illegal migration is difficult. In regions with free movement, like the European Union, it’s particularly challenging. For example, someone could move from Germany to France, live there without registering, and go uncounted in official migration records.2 The rise of remote work has made it easier for people to live in different countries without registering as employees or taxpayers.

Immigration policy for low-skill immigrants, 1783-2010, for the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Kuwait, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Africa, South Korea, Switzerland, Taiwan, United Kingdom, United States.

Many western liberal democracies have witnessed increased discrimination against immigrants and opposition to multiculturalism. Prior research identifies ethno-linguistic differences between immigrant and native populations as the key source of such bias. Linguistic assimilation has therefore been proposed as an important mechanism to reduce discrimination and mitigate conflict between natives and immigrants. Using large-scale field experiments conducted in 29 cities across Germany--a country with a high influx of immigrants and refugees--we empirically test whether linguistic assimilation reduces discrimination against Muslim immigrants in every-day social interactions. We find that it does not; Muslim immigrants are no less likely to be discriminated against even if they appear to be linguistically assimilated. However, we also find that ethno-linguistic differences alone do not cause bias among natives in a country with a large immigrant population and state policies that encourage multiculturalism.

The IMISEM dataset contains 828 indicators on the migration policies of 32 polities from Europe, South East Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. The IMISEM project adopts a comprehensive view of migration policy that includes both its emigrant/ emigration and immigrant/ immigration sides, bridging for the first time the two sides of migration policy. Thus, the dataset includes indicators that measure emigration policies (exit policies and control of outflows), immigration policies (entry policies and control of inflows), emigrant policies (rights granted, services offered and obligations imposed on non-resident citizens), immigrant policies (mainly, rights granted to non-citizen residents) and citizenship policies (mainly, access to naturalization for immigrants and retention of citizenship by emigrants). The main sources used to complete the IMISEM questionnaires are legal sources (i.e. laws, regulations). Legal sources are complemented with secondary sources (for instance, policy reports) and interviews with experts. The IMISEM Dataset is one of the main outputs of the “The Every Immigrant is an Emigrant Project (IMISEM)” funded by the Leibniz Gemeinschaft and carried out at the GIGA German Institute for Global and Area Studies between 2017 and 2020.

Migration Policy Complexity (COMPLEXMIG) Dataset includes information on the complexity of the embedded in the German Residence Act since 2005 and until 2023. For each entry, the dataset provides information about the indicators of policy complexity (i.e. size, structural depth, word entropy, Lix score, internal and external references), and the validity dates of each version.

Comprehensive dataset containing 203 verified Immigration & naturalization service businesses in Germany with complete contact information, ratings, reviews, and location data.

The Integration Barometer is a representative public survey of people with and without a migration background in Germany. It measures the integration climate in Germany as an immigration country and captures the population’s perceptions and expectations with regard to integration and migration as well as integration and migration policy.

Population in main residence households: Germany, years, gender, age groups, migration status

Historical dataset showing Germany net migration by year from 1960 to 2024.

Tweets related to immigration made by Compact Magazin, Junge Freiheit, and Sezession im Netz between April 2009 and October 2022.

Comprehensive dataset containing 19 verified Immigration detention centre businesses in Germany with complete contact information, ratings, reviews, and location data.

The dataset includes aggregate immigration opinions in 13 West European countries (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden and Switzerland). The estimations are the result of a dyadic ratios algorithm.

Data and R-code to replicate the findings from our article "Broad and detailed agreement: Public preferences for German immigration policy". Abstract: Immigration policy is often considered one of the most divisive issues in Western Europe and North America. We explore whether that debate has been oversimplified. We start from the position that immigration is a complex issue comprising many specific policy choices. We then investigate whether preferences are consistently open or closed across a range of immigration policy criteria. We analyze an original survey with a nationally representative sample of Germans. Our results suggest that preferences are not consistently open or closed on immigration, integration, and naturalization regulations. Overall, the German public would prefer to be open on some aspects of immigration policy and closed on others. In addition, population subsets who are either “pro-” or “anti-” immigration in general have the same preferences for whether to be open or closed on specific immigration policies. Our findings promote a more detailed approach to studying immigration preferences, which adds nuance to the idea of immigration as a grand societal conflict. In doing so, we highlight how future studies can refine expectations about when policy preferences are more permissive or restrictive.

RESPOND project produced a high level of empirical material in 11 countries (Sweden, the UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon) where the research is conducted between the period 2017-2020. The country teams gathered macro (policies), meso (implementation/stakeholders) and micro (individuals/asylum seekers and refuges) level data related to the thematic fields formulated in four work packages: borders, protection regimes, reception, and integration. An important contribution of this research has been its micro/individual focus which enabled the research teams to capture and understand the migration experiences of asylum seekers and refugees and their responses to the policies and obstacles that they have encountered.

Country teams conducted in total 539 interviews with refugees and asylum seekers, and more than 210 interviews with stakeholders (state and non-state actors) working in the field of migration. Additionally, the project has conducted a survey study in Sweden and Turkey (n=700 in each country), covering similar topics.

This dataset is only about the micro part of the Respond research, and reflects data derived out of 539 interviews conducted with asylum seekers and refugees in 11 countries and here presented in a quantitative form. The whole dataset is structured along the work package topics: Border, Protection, Reception and Integration.

This dataset is prepared as part of Work Package D4.4 (Dataset on Reception) the Horizon 2020 RESPOND project as a joint effort of the below listed project partners.

• • Uppsala University (dataset entries from Sweden)
• • Göttingen University (dataset entries from Germany)
• • Glasgow Caledonian University (dataset entries from the UK and Hungary)
• • Istanbul Bilgi University (dataset entries from Turkey)
• • University of Cambridge (dataset entries from the UK, Sweden and Germany)
• • Swedish Research Institute Istanbul (dataset entries from Turkey)
• • University of Florence (dataset entries from Italy)
• • Özyegin University (dataset entries from Turkey)
• • University of Aegean (dataset entries from Greece)
• • University of Warsaw (dataset entries from Poland)
• • Hammurabi Human Rights Organization (dataset entries from Iraq)
• • Lebanon Support (dataset entries from Lebanon)
• • Austrian Academy of Sciences (dataset entries from Austria)

This dataset is about countries per year in Germany. It has 1 row and is filtered where the date is 2021. It features 4 columns: country, incidence of HIV, and net migration.

These replication files reproduce the analyses from the paper ‘Schaub, Max, Johanna Gereke, and Delia Baldassarri. 2020. “Strangers in Hostile Lands: Exposure to Refugees and Right-Wing Support in Germany’s Eastern Regions.”

RESPOND project produced a high level of empirical material in 11 countries (Sweden, the UK, Germany, Italy, Poland, Austria, Greece, Bulgaria, Turkey, Iraq, and Lebanon) where the research is conducted between the period 2017-2020. The country teams gathered macro (policies), meso (implementation/stakeholders) and micro (individuals/asylum seekers and refuges) level data related to the thematic fields formulated in four work packages: borders, protection regimes, reception, and integration. An important contribution of this research has been its micro/individual focus which enabled the research teams to capture and understand the migration experiences of asylum seekers and refugees and their responses to the policies and obstacles that they have encountered. Country teams conducted in total 539 interviews with refugees and asylum seekers, and more than 210 interviews with stakeholders (state and non-state actors) working in the field of migration. Additionally, the project has conducted a survey study in Sweden and Turkey (n=700 in each country), covering similar topics. This dataset is only about the micro part of the Respond research, and reflects data derived out of 539 interviews conducted with asylum seekers and refugees in 11 countries and here presented in a quantitative form. The whole dataset is structured along the work package topics: Borders, Protection, Reception and Integration. This dataset is prepared as part of Work Package D3.5 (Dataset on refugee protection) the Horizon 2020 RESPOND project as a joint effort of the below listed project partners. • Uppsala University (dataset entries from Sweden) • Göttingen University (dataset entries from Germany) • Glasgow Caledonian University (dataset entries from the UK and Hungary) • Istanbul Bilgi University (dataset entries from Turkey) • University of Cambridge (dataset entries from the UK, Sweden and Germany) • Swedish Research Institute Istanbul (dataset entries from Turkey) • University of Florence (dataset entries from Italy) • Özyegin University (dataset entries from Turkey) • University of Aegean (dataset entries from Greece) • University of Warsaw (dataset entries from Poland) • Hammurabi Human Rights Organization (dataset entries from Iraq) • Lebanon Support (dataset entries from Lebanon) • Austrian Academy of Sciences (dataset entries from Austria)