UNITED NATIONS SECRETARIAT ESA/STAT/AC.119/7

Department of Economic and Social AffairsNovember 2006

Statistics Division English only

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United Nations Expert Group Meeting on

Measuring international migration: Concepts and methods

4–7 December 2006

United Nations, New York

Using register data to monitor the immigration

and emigration of immigrants*

Prepared by

Vebjørn Aalandslid

Statistics Norway

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* This document is being reproduced without formal editing.

Using register data to monitor theimmigration and emigration of immigrants[1]

  1. This paper aims at describing the Central Register of Population (CPR) in Norway and elaborates on its many advantages in producing reliable migration statistics. Focusing on immigration and emigration of immigrants to Norway,we will show how historic statistics, based on data from the CPR, can say something aboutthe current and maybe future flows of migrants to Norway. As an illustration of the use of the CPR, we show how this system can examine net migration of immigrants to Norway. Most other studies focus on all migrations or the migration of foreign citizens, this article takes a different perspective focusing solely on the migration (and emigration) of immigrants.The CPR enables us to follow the immigrants in Norway over time in order to see who stays and who chooses to emigrate.
  1. The long-term trend from 1990 and onwards is an increase both in immigration and emigration. During this period, around twice as many persons moved to Norway as compared to those that left. The net immigration has gradually been increasing from an average of approximately 7,000 persons per year at the beginning of the 1990s, via more than 10,000 at the end of the 1990s, to the current net immigration level of around 13,000 persons per year. The net immigration in the last 5 years has been greater in scope and broader in composition than previously. Only 5 of the 10 largest net immigration countries to Norway during the period 2000-2004 are found in the overview of the largest country groups in the immigrant population today. For the “older” immigration countries, emigration has gradually grown considerably, and balances out the immigration for certain years. This is a development that can also be seen for some “newer” immigration countries in recent years.
  1. The Central Register of Population - Statistics is not the primary objective…The main source for Norwegian migration statistics, both on stocks and flows, is information from the CPR. Most demographic statistics in Norway is based upon the CPR; although the register was established primarily for administrative, not statistical purposes (Østby 2002). This is important, as this determines many aspects of the quality of the statistics that may be produced.
  1. The CPR was established in 1964, based on the Population Census of 1960. Between 1964 and 1990, it was located within Statistics Norway, and run jointly by the tax authorities and Statistics Norway, with all municipal offices being run by the tax authorities. From its inception, the CPR has included all persons who were registered as being settled in Norway at the time of the Census as well as all registered population movements, and assigned them a unique Personal Identification Number (PIN-code). The PIN-code is essential in linking the persons registered in the CPR to information about them in other administrative registers for the purpose of statistical descriptions and analysis.
  1. Based on information in the CPR each person resident is classified as belonging to the immigrant population if they have an intention to stay in the country for more than six months and a) are born abroad by two foreign born parents (first generation immigrants) or b) born in Norway by two foreign born parents (descendents).
  1. The requirements for a residence permit are different for Norwegian and other Nordic citizens (they do not need a permit), other European Economic Area (EEA) citizens (they must apply, but will normally be granted a permit) and other citizens. In relation to the definition of immigration, however, this is not significant. The national registration system makes decisions on the specific relocation cases in accordance with the legislation on population registration and its directives.
  1. When persons die or emigrate, a PIN-code is never re-assigned, and all relevant information is kept in the historical archives. The person will stay in the register "for ever", but one status variable will be given a value that excludes these persons for statistical purposes, like making population stock statistics. This means that the PIN-code can be used for linking all the various registers that are based on this system, but only those relevant for each purpose will be linked. It has been a common policy for Norwegian governments of different backgrounds that all individual-based registers shall be integrated in this system. The use of the registers has been regulated in the Statistical Acts (from 1907, and 1989), and in the laws regulating the registration of individual information. These laws give Statistics Norway access to all official registers, and the right to use them for statistical and research purposes, given that protection of individual privacy is taken care of properly.
  1. All children born alive to parents resident in Norway are included in the register as are the live births to immigrants who have been granted a permit to stay. Their inclusion is based on the UN definition of usual place of residence[2] (UN Recommendations on Statistics of International Migration 1998), but linked to an intention to stay for at least six months as opposed to the UN recommendation for actual stay of at least one year. All vital events (births, deaths, marriages, national and international migration etc.) and demographic characteristics like age, marital status, citizenship, number of children, place of birth, national background (including parental country of birth), and year of first immigration are registered against this PIN. From this information it is possible to reconstruct individual demographic biographies for the period over which the register has existed. In addition, a number of registers in the private and governmental sectors also use the same PIN. To mention just a few from the governmental sector: school attendance, educational attainment, labour market participation, registers of income and wealth based on tax returns, social security, criminality and driving licenses. The PIN code is required to open a bank account or to apply for a loan.

Quality of data

  1. As the information from the register system is so widely used, we may reasonably assume that all serious quality problems have been uncovered, although not necessarily solved. The most serious problems are linked to place of residence of young persons, mainly students, where the registration rules are not in accordance with the principles for population statistics. However during the last years there has been done substantial work in order to get better unity between students’ actual place of residence and their reported residence. The great majority of immigrants are included, if not always on their exact date of arrival, because it is very difficult to live in Norway for any length of time without being registered. Those given a PIN will normally be legally resident immigrants – immigrants without the necessary permits are not to be included in the register. The number of persons living in Norway illegally is difficult to gauge precisely but police estimates give a maximum of 5,000. The majority are probably persons who have overstayed a visa or temporary permit, and not illegally resident immigrants who intend to remain permanently in Norway.

Unregistered emigration poses a bigger problem than immigration

  1. One problem is linked to the emigration of immigrants. Many of these are unaware of their obligation to notify the register upon departure, and even if they knew, they might not see any reason for doing so. For some foreign workers it might be in their employers’ or their own interest not to de-register, and such cases can obviously affect the reliability of the statistics on both stocks and flows. Estimates made around 1990 indicated that between 10,000 and 15,000 foreigners had left the country without being de-registered. The majority of these were from origin countries of oil-workers such as, for instance, the UK and the USA, with fewer third world migrants than might have been expected. Since then, the system for de-registration has been improved. Whenever personal rights and other interests depend on register status, e.g. voting rights or ownership rights, these pose risks to register quality.
    During the period March 1987 to January 1994, the regulations stated that asylum seekers could be registered as immigrated prior to their application being granted, but now they are dealt with in line with other persons who need a residence permit in order to be registered as domiciled. For statistics purposes, this means that many are counted in a later year than they actually arrived in the country. Applicants who are rejected are not included in the immigration statistics.

Net migration of immigrants

  1. Statistics Norway’s annually published figures on immigration to Norway are normally based on two main variables; immigration by citizenship or immigration by country of origin[3]. A total of 36,482 persons immigrated to Norway in 2005, of which 27,864 were foreign nationals and 8,618 were Norwegian citizens. The corresponding figures for emigration are also available. In 2004, 23,271 persons emigrated, of which 9,415 were Norwegian citizens, while 13,856 were foreign nationals.
  1. This information is inadequate for our purposes, which is to find immigration and emigration figures for the immigrant population. The group of Norwegian citizens will also include a number of persons with immigrant backgrounds. Analyses will not intercept this group if we only examine citizenship. Correspondingly, if we only focus on country of origin, we will intercept many of those with a Norwegian background and those who for various reasons have chosen to return to Norway.
  1. We therefore take Statistics Norway’s definition of the immigrant population as a basis for our analyses. This entails 36,482 persons who immigrated to Norway last year being grouped according to their own or their parents’ native country.A total of 28,155 thus end up in the category first generation immigrants to Norway; 355 are children of couples of first generation immigrants to Norway, 5,323 are without any immigrant background (i.e. they have a Norwegian background), while the remaining 2,649 are either foreign born with Norwegian born parents (e.g. children of missionaries born abroad or to Norwegian couples who have worked or studied abroad), are Norwegian born with one foreign born parent or foreign born with one Norwegian born parent, or are adopted in Norway. None of these are included in the immigrant population.
  1. Our studies take an in-depth look at only the first two categories; first generation immigrants and their children, and persons born in Norway to two foreign born parents (often referred to as descendants). We will examine the development in the immigration and emigration for these two groups from 1990 to the current day.

The Norwegian immigrant population

  1. First, however, it may be useful to obtain an overview of the time from 1970 when Norway (at least in recent times) was a net immigration country.

Figure 1a. Immigrant population in Norway by immigration category. Persons. 1970-2005.

  1. Ever since 1970, Norway has had a net immigration, if we look solely at the immigrant population[4]. There are currently around 365,000 immigrants in Norway. Of these, 300,000 have immigrated themselves while 65,000 were born in Norway to two parents who immigrated. In total 8 percent of Norway’s registered resident population have an immigrant background. Compared with other OECD countries the relative size of Norway’s immigrant population is modest. But the growth in the immigrant population has been substantial during the last 10-15 years. In 1990, where our analyses begin, there were around 150,000 first generation immigrants in Norway. Prior to this, average immigration levels were somewhat lower than later years. However, there were also a few years in the 1980s where immigration to Norway was high. The years 1987 and 1988 had particularly high levels of immigration, which was partly due to the large numbers of refugees from Vietnam and Chile. Between 1971 and 1985, the net immigration was around 5,000 per year.

Just as many women as men

  1. As with the Norwegian population without immigration background, the immigrant population consists of roughly the same number of women and men. Among immigrants with background from North-America and Western Europe women were overrepresented for a long time. However, today this group has about the same number of men and women. There are however huge differences between the different country backgrounds.

Figure 1b. Gender ratio (women per 100 men) with immigrant background 1970-2006.

Figure 2a. Immigration of the immigrant population by region[5] and year. Persons per annum. 1990-2005.[6]

Immigration

  1. When interpreting the development in immigration in recent years it is important not to be blinded by individual years. First, it is often the case that movement in one year is closely related to events in the previous year. If we look at the year 2002 as an isolated case, this was a year of high immigration levels from a number of countries. This does not necessarily mean that there was a flood of people suddenly deciding to move to Norway that year. A great deal of the immigration in 2002 was related to a backlog of cases with the immigration authorities, which resulted in many being granted family reunification permits. Additionally, a number of local authorities in Norway had the capacity and were willing to allow more refugees to settle than normal that year. Overall, this meant a high level of immigration for 2002, but the applications to settle in Norway may well have been sent several years beforehand. This indicates that there can be conditions other than the individual immigrant’s movements that determine what year the immigration actually takes place. Although new trends can be seen in individual years, looking at the average over longer periods would give a better basis for drawing conclusions over time.

19.Figure 2a shows the development of the immigrant population’s immigration to Norway from 1990-2004. While the first half of the 1990s had an average immigration below 20,000 a year, the last 5 years saw an increase to an average of almost 30,000 per year. The composition of countries of origin also changed during the course of these 15 years.

20. Both at the start and the end of the period, immigrants from Asia (including Turkey), Africa and Latin America made up the largest group, and immigration from these countries has accounted for almost half of the immigration to Norway in the last 5 years.

21.Immigration from Nordic countries was at its peak in the mid 1990s, which was largely due to Swedes immigrating to Norway for work. The two peaks in the East European immigration both stem from conflicts in the Balkans in the 1990s. First were the refugees mainly from Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1993, followed by therefugees from Kosovo (SerbiaandMontenegro) in 1999.Immigration from the rest of East Europe after 2000 was mainly from Russia, and is higher (with the exception of the two peak years) than in the 1990s. The group consisting of EEA, North America and Oceania has had a marked increased in recent years, and in 2004 was the second largest immigration group to Norway. Growth in this group is mainly due to the increased immigration from Poland and Lithuania, but also from “older” EU countries such as Germany. This growth continued throughout the first quarter of 2005. The largest countries included in the group Asia, Africa and Latin America are described in more detail later.

Figure 2b. Emigration of immigrants by region and year. Persons per annum. 1990-2005.[7]

Emigration

22.In line with the immigration some years previously, the highest emigration from Norway during the period 1990 to 2004 as a whole was by persons born in the other Nordic countries, see figure 2b. Emigration in this group has remained at around 5,000-6,000 in recent years. There has been a gradual increase in emigration bythe Asia, Africa and South America group, which in 2003 was almost as high as the Nordic group, and in 2004 had the highest level of emigration from Norway. The fall in emigration in 2005 must be viewed with caution as there will be a number of emigrations by Norwegian citizens with immigrant backgrounds in this group in particular. The figures from 2005 do not reflect the fact that they are just expanding their citizenship.

23.The increase in emigrations from Asia, Africa and South America cannot be ascribed to any one country; recent years have seen a steady rise in emigration for all of the main non-western countries. The rest of East Europe has two peaks (even if these are not as distinct as for the immigration); 1993-94 and 2000-2001, which comprises the emigration of Bosnians and Kosovo Albanians respectively.

24.The reorganisation of registers in the Office of the National Registrar will play an important role for these figures. For individual years, the deleting of persons from the Central Population Register can have a major effect on the figures without necessarily reflecting an actual relocation for that particular year. Such “administrative” emigrations are included in the statistics in the year they are discovered and registered, which may be at a date subsequent to when the emigration actually took place.

Figure 3. Emigration of descendants by region. Persons per annum. 1990-2004.