Migrants' social rights. Evaluating a new approach to collect institutional data for comparative research

The purpose of this research note is to develop protocols and templates for data collection, which could be applied to social policy legislation in order to create new indicators on the social rights of migrants.
In this research note, we review the current state-of-the-art of social policy data specifically addressing the situation of migrants. We identify a need for new quantitative indicators of what rights migrants can expect from social policy that are suitable for systematic cross-national research. We also outline an approach to collect such indicators, including a data template that fruitfully can be used as a starting point for future infrastructure projects on migrants’ social rights. In order to test the feasibility of our new approach, we asked national experts to complete the data template for their countries. Thereafter we evaluated their experience of being part of this data collection project.
The methodology of inviting external national experts to complete the data template on migrants’ social rights proved possible, but highly challenging. It was difficult to cover a large number of countries, and data quality was an issue of concern. We also encountered problems in following up on data codings with the national experts after the initial task was completed.
Our experience in this pilot project of immigrants’ social rights suggests that future implementations at a minimum should be based on a budget sufficient to pay the national experts for their time – and to be able to commit them to quality control updates. A viable alternative might be to collect data in-house, and rely on experts on an ad-hoc basis, and when needed.
Data on migrants’ social rights is of great importance in analyses of social Europe, but data are not readily available in a way suitable for quantitative analyses. Despite the challenges inherent to this pilot project, the data we were able to generate reveal interesting cross-country differences. There are therefore strong reasons for continued efforts in setting up a database specifically designed to explore the social rights of migrants in Europe.