On the West–East methodological bias in measuring international migration

ABSTRACT

This article examines the complex relations between two social processes – standardisation and quantification in measuring migration. We explore how international migrant populations in the European territories of the former USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia have been defined, counted and presented in European population statistics. Our analysis led us to conclude that the category of international migrant, defined as a person born abroad according to the present-time borders, has low contextual validity in postsocialist European contexts. Perceived as universally applicable, however, the category is persistently used in enumerating migration in postsocialist Europe. We argue that the unchallenged transferability of the category of international migrant across contexts is based on the West–East methodological bias – a preconception embedded in the standardisation and quantification of migration. The West–East methodological bias plays a dual role. It fuels the initial perception of the category, forged in Western geopolitical contexts, as standardised and applicable across different settings. Then, in combination with the perceived power of the quantified representation of reality, the West–East methodological bias contributes to the further objectification of the standardised category.

KEYWORDS:

• Methodological bias
• Europe
• migration statistics
• quantification
• standardisation
• politics of knowledge

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Anat Rosenthal for her insightful comments on the earlier drafts of the article. We also thank the editor and two anonymous reviewers for their suggestions and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, we use the term ‘Europe’ in its geographical sense and focus on the postsocialist countries which saw changes in their sovereign borders after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In fact, these countries represent the majority of contemporary postsocialist states in the region. We are of course cognizant of the variations in historical and political paths across these countries. However, for the purposes of this article, we focus on their shared historical processes of change regarding sovereign borders and socialist past. See Appendix A.

2 In these data sources the term ‘international migrant’ is used interchangeably with the term ‘foreign-born’.

3 For a more detailed discussion of the definitions of international migrant in the major cross-national aggregated data sets (Eurostat, the OECD and the World Bank Indicators) see (Gorodzeisky and Leykin 2020).

4 Although nominally stable since WWII, the nation-state borders of several Western European countries have nevertheless been politically contested over the last seventy years. See for example, the Basque country and Catalonia in Spain or Northern Ireland and Scotland in the UK.

5 Although in the further reconstruction of the category of international migrant based on the EVS and ESS individual level data, we use data from 2008, in Figure 1 we present aggregated data from 2010. This is because the WBI, the only aggregated data source that covers all the countries under study, releases information on migration population every five years and 2010 is the closest point in time to the available individual level data used for the reconstruction of the category (2008 for the EVS).

6 In addition to the 16 postsocialist countries included in our study, another country re-established along new sovereign borders and partially located in the European region, namely Georgia, took part in the 2008 EVS round. However, in the Georgian sample, the number of persons not born in the country was too small to provide reliable estimates. For that reason, we excluded Georgia form the analysis.

7 Needless to say, the distinction between international and internal migration lies not only in the presence/lack of sovereign borders but also in the strikingly different social conditions and political implications of these two migration patterns on the lives of individuals. In many historical instances, the communist/socialist federations’ international borders were tightly sealed. Within the Communist federations themselves, however, internal migration was often prompted by central government resettlement policies; in many occasions, it was far from being voluntary and was structured by the distribution of industrial sectors. This also affected the perceptions of movement and belonging by migrants themselves (for Czechoslovakia see Blažejovská 2013; for the USSR see Kolstø 1999; Smith et al. 2002; for Yugoslavia see Zavratnik 2012).

8 If information on a specific country of birth or year of arrival was missing in the dataset, we considered those respondents as historically international migrants, in order to create more conservative estimates of the proportion of historically internal migrants.

9 Unlike in Belarus, in a few other cases there are visible discrepancies between the EVS data on the percent of those not born within the current borders of the state and the United Nations data on international migration stock, published by the WBI. The discrepancies occur mostly in cases in which, because of lack of data on the foreign-born population, the UN reported estimates of international migration stock based on other measures. In some cases, the data was substituted with the information on foreign citizens (e.g. Czechia). For countries with no data available on the number of international migrants, estimates were obtained by imputation (e.g. Bosnia-Herzegovina). In other cases, the number of refugees obtained from the UNHCR was added to the number of foreign-born persons in the country (e.g. Croatia) (United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Population Division 2017). In addition, a general tendency of surveys to underestimate minority and migrant populations should be acknowledged.

10 There are several instances in which the country of birth can also be problematic in defining international migration in Western Europe. For example, returning children of colonial expatriates, entering France from Algeria or entering Portugal from Angola and Mozambique following the independence of the former colonies, were classified as international migrants (Schneider and Heath 2020). Aside from the fact that return migration has a qualitatively different nature, the distinction between these instances and our case studies lies in the migration's different temporal sequence. Thus, the overwhelming majority of those who are defined as international migrants due to the processes of decolonization (e.g. French Pied-noir in Algeria) crossed sovereign state borders during or after the geopolitical change (Eldridge 2010). In postsocialist countries in Europe, people who remained sedentary when the sovereign borders began to change, while previously moving within one common state, were classified as international migrants. Although strikingly different in scale, there is one instance in which possible similarities between postsocialist and Western Europe could be found. In 2010, the judicial status of the islands of Bonaire, Saint Eustatius and Saba was changed from a partly self-governed entity of the Netherlands Antilles to a special municipality of the continental Netherlands. Despite this change, people who arrive from these islands to the Netherlands after 2010 are still classified as international migrants (Grommé and Scheel 2020).

11 For example, median age for the historically internal migrants in Estonia is 61 as compared to a general median age of 50, in Slovakia 63 as compared to 54, in Serbia 55 as compared to 45, in Armenia 57 as compared to 43 (author’ own calculations based on the EVS data).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Israel Science Foundation: [Grant Number 948/20].