"World Economic and Social Survey 2004"

(UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, November 2004)

The second part of this survey addresses international migration. It examines historical and recent surges in migration, policies towards migration, its economic and social effects, the question of refugees and the state of international cooperation regarding migration. The survey also addresses the question of numbers of unauthorized migrants (see below).

http://www.un.org/esa/policy/wess/index.htm

Extracts from Chapter 2: International Migration Trends

Unauthorized migration, by its very nature, is not well reflected in official statistics. Nevertheless, there are some statistical sources that shed light on the magnitude of irregular migration.

The results of regularization programmes provide such statistics. Italy and Spain, for instance, have conducted a number o regularization drives since the late 1980s. In Spain 44,000 applications for regularization were lodged in 1985-1986 and 133,000 in 1991, of which 110,000 were regularized (SOPEMI (Continuous Reporting System on Migration), 1997). Nationals from Argentina, the Dominican Republic, Morocco and Peru constituted the major groups applying for regularization. More recently, almost 600,000 applications were filed in Spain during two exceptional regularization programmes implemented in 2000 and 2001 (SOPEMI (Continuous Reporting System on Migration), 2004).

In Italy, 105,000 migrants had regularized their status under a drive carried out in 1987-1988 and 216,000 obtained temporary residence permits through a regularization programme implemented in 1990. The largest groups regularized were citizens of Morocco, Tunisia, Senegal, the Philippines and the former Yugoslavia, in order of importance (United Nations, 1998). The most recent regularization in Italy took place in 2002 when 700,000 applications were lodged during the first three months of the programme. By 2000, migrants who had regularized their status were estimated to have accounted for 4 per cent of all migrants in France, 14 per cent of those in Portugal and Spain and 25 per cent of those in Greece and Italy (Salt, 2002).

Estimates of the overall level of unauthorized migration in Western Europe vary considerably. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) put the number at 3 million in the late 1990s (International Organization for Migration, 2000). The International Labour Office argues that, if irregular migrants are assumed to have constituted 15 per cent of the foreign population in Western Europe, there would have been 3.3 million migrants with an irregular status in 2000 when the region was estimated to have had 22 million foreign residents (International Labor Organization, 2004). Europol is reported to believe that about half a million undocumented migrants enter EU annually (ibid.).

In addition, estimates of unauthorized migration in individual countries vary widely. For instance, the number of unauthorized migrants in France in the late 1990s was estimated to have been either 140,000 or 500,000 (Delaunay, 1998; International Organization for Migration, 2000). Recent estimates of the number of irregular workers in Switzerland range from 70,000 to 180,000 (Piguet and Losa, 2002). In the Russian Federation, the Ministry of the Interior estimated that in September 2003, there were 5 million foreigners whose legal status was unclear, of whom 1.5 million were “clearly unauthorized” (International Labor Organization, 2004).

With the easing of travel restrictions in Eastern and Central European countries during the 1980s, several of them became countries of transit for unauthorized migrants heading west, if not de facto destinations for those migrants who failed to proceed on their westward journey. The Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland served as countries of transit but their recent admission to EU is expected to strengthen their capacity to keep unauthorized migrants out. The eastern expansion of EU is also expected to reduce the short-term visits of citizens from neighbouring countries who engage in petty trade and other unauthorized economic activities. Although these movements did not qualify as migration, they appeared to be an important source of income for people in the countries involved (Okólski, 1998).

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