ROADMAP

Roadmaps aim to inform citizens and stakeholders about the Commission's work to allow them to provide feedback and to participate effectively in future consultation activities. Citizens and stakeholders are in particular invited to provide views on the Commission's understanding of the problem and possible solutions and to share any relevant information that they may have.

Title of the initiative

European statistics on migration and international protection

Lead DG – responsible unit

Eurostat – F2

Likely Type of initiative

Interinstitutional legislative file

Indicative Planning

Q2 2018

Additional Information

https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/european-agenda-migration_en

This Roadmap is provided for information purposes only. It does not prejudge the final decision of the Commission on whether this initiative will be pursued or on its final content. All elements of the initiative described by the Roadmap, including its timing, are subject to change.

A. Context, problem definition and subsidiarity check

Context

Migration to the EU has undergone profound changes over recent years. To address these challenges, the Commission has developed a number of policies set out in the Communication on the delivery of European Agenda on Migration 1 . These include a Common European Asylum System and policies addressing children in migration, legal migration, resettlement, humanitarian admission and other forms of legal admission. The Commission (Eurostat) regularly collects statistics on asylum and managed migration, in accordance with EC Regulation 862/2007 on Community statistics on migration and international protection 2 . This Regulation, together with a Commission Regulation classifying the reasons for the residence permits 3 , are the legal instruments for collecting mandatory statistics in the managed migration and asylum area. However, the new political needs for statistics on asylum and managed migration are not covered in the current EC Regulation (862/2007). The amendment of this Regulation is, therefore, necessary to give a legal basis to these data needs.

Problem the initiative aims to tackle

The content and quality of European statistics on migration produced by Eurostat show a number of gaps, in particular given the developments in the area of migration in the EU. More frequent and timelier data on several new elements related to migratory flows and migrants, are needed and these are not foreseen under the current legal framework. So far, the new statistical needs in this domain have been managed on a voluntary basis and agreed in the dedicated Expert Group in cooperation with the Member States. Experience shows (for example as regards return statistics) that this approach is not always efficient. Under the European Agenda on Migration, the European and national systems administering asylum and managing migration are evolving. As the characteristics of migration and migrants are changing, there is a need to enhance statistics according to stakeholders' evolving needs, making them more relevant and building a stronger evidence base for policy making and evaluation. A need for specific revisions to EC Regulation 862/2007 has been expressed by stakeholders, as mentioned in the 'Progress Report on the European Agenda on Migration' 4 . This report points to very precise improvements, in particular on returns (higher frequency and more mandatory categories), resettlement, residence permits and children in migration statistics. The issue is even more acute for EU-level policy makers and policy evaluation. There is a clear demand to enhance statistics on administrative events related to migration to reflect recent and forthcoming policy evolution and to increase the responsiveness of the European Statistical System to the changes happening to migration itself and related EU level policies. There is also a need to assure better completeness and certainty for current Member States' voluntary data transmissions. Likewise, a mechanism for further improvements to migration statistics has to be developed to increase the responsiveness of the European Statistical System to any further developments in migration data requirements. Not upgrading European statistics is likely to result in rapidly increasing gaps in information particularly pertinent for policymaking and evaluation, and thus hinder policymakers from responding on the basis of evidence to future migration challenges.

Basis for EU intervention (legal basis and subsidiarity check)

EU action in this field is based on Article 338 (1) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which provides the legal basis for European statistics.

The objective of this initiative is to revise and complete the existing common rules for the collection and compilation of European statistics on migration and international protection. For reasons of comparability, and given the transborder nature of the data, this task cannot be achieved by Member States alone. Moreover, the compilation of statistics on migration and international protection at European level requires a harmonised methodology and a definition of common outputs. This can be successfully achieved only at Union level.

B. What does the initiative aim to achieve and how

The aim is to support the European Agenda on Migration by providing EU policy- and decision-makers with better and more timely statistics, to strengthen the response to the challenges posed by migration. In particular, the initiative will strengthen the quality of European statistics in the area of asylum and managed migration by giving a legal base to statistics currently collected on a voluntary basis. The revision will ensure provision of statistics in those areas where clear needs have been expressed by stakeholders, notably, on returns (higher frequency and more mandatory categories), residence permits and children in migration statistics. To ensure the relevance of statistics produced and allow for responsiveness in the development of migration data, the revision will provide that the Commission can specify the categories and disaggregations of the statistics to be collected.

C. Better regulation

Consultation of citizens and stakeholders

Considering that the proposed action of amending Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 would not have any significant impact on society or the economy (see explanation below), it is planned to consult only the European Statistical System Committee composed of the national statistical institutes (NSIs) that are responsible for coordinating all activities at national level related to European statistics.

Evidence base and data collection

The proposed amendment of EC Regulation 862/2007 sets out a legal basis for current voluntary data collections and provides flexibility in the future specifications of data. It does not involve any changes to the themes or subject matter of the statistics already collected under this Regulation. The narrow scope of the changes proposed and the fact that Member States already provide the statistics concerned on a voluntary basis implies that the costs of making the collection of this data obligatory are marginal. Against this background, no impact assessment will be prepared for this proposal.

The current legal framework under EC Regulation 862/2007 has been regularly evaluated by the Commission 5 . It was concluded that migration statistics should be flexible so as to better reflect the evolving needs of the users while taking into account the capacity of the data providers; and that the situation could lead to proposals for amendments of the Regulation to add new data categories or specific disaggregations. Thus, voluntary data collections were developed.

The additional administrative costs and burden falling on the Member States linked to the transmission of data proposed in the current amendment of Regulation (EC) No 862/2007 is negligible: the continuous exchange of experiences and practices with the national data providers during the Expert Group meetings over many years has decreased the administrative burden on national administrations. Over time, significant improvements to the transmission methods were achieved resulting in a decrease of the effort required for the preparation and delivery of data. Among others, Eurostat has implemented data transmission formats that allow the national data providers to extract data directly from their databases (e.g. avoiding time consuming manual data compilations in Excel format) and provide them via an automated transmission tool including a standardised and automated validation procedure, e.g. instant quality feedback reduces the effort, as it leads to situation where Member States have to deal with the provision only once as opposed to a situation when they have to come back to it at certain periods of time over and over again. This has led to efficiency gains and significant reduction in the number of transmission rounds due to errors found in the data provided. These efficiency gains have materialised at national level and reduced the exchanges with the national data providers. The feedback collected at the Expert Group meetings shows that these improvements are considered, by data providing entities, as reducing the work linked to data extractions and multiple transmissions.