Current status of the collection of international migration statistics

The Statistics Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations (United Nations Statistics Division) has been collecting statistics on international migration for more than 50 years. The lack of uniformity among countries in determining who is an international migrant has long been recognized by national authorities as well as by the international communities. Efforts towards creating uniform definitions and methods in producing comparable international migration statistics had been initiated in the early 1920s by the International Labour Conference. In the late 1940s, the Population Commission and the Statistical Commission of the United Nations had addressed the issue of producing recommendations on international migration statistics. As a result, the first set of United Nations recommendations was adopted in 1953 (United Nations, 1953). The recommendations were then revised in 1976 (United Nations, 1979). Subsequently, revised recommendations were produced and published as Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration, Revision 1, in 1998 (United Nations, 1998c).

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