Getting into the flow – what do we know now, 15 years since CLANDESTINO?
Immigration, particularly irregular migration, has become increasingly politicised, largely due to its entanglement with debates over national security, economic pressures, and cultural identity.
This reality underscores the importance of collecting good-quality data on the size of the irregular migrant population, not only stocks (i.e., the total number of irregular migrants residing in a particular location at a specific point in time, offering a snapshot of the migrant population but also flows (i.e., the movement of irregular migrants over a defined period, capturing arrivals, departures, and net migration, providing a dynamic perspective on migration patterns and trends). The first large-scale EU-funded project to do so was CLANDESTINO (Undocumented Migration: Counting the Uncountable: Data and Trends Across
Europe), which ran from 2007 to 2009. Now over a decade since CLANDESTINO, and with managing irregular migration flows a mainstay
policy priority in the EU and other countries, this book chapter outlines the main findings from the MIrreM Project’s Work Package on Flows (WP4). More specifically, it provides a summary of the current approaches to measuring irregular migration flows, and addresses the question: what do we know now about irregular migration flows, 15 years since CLANDESTINO?
Publication details: Siruno, L., & Leerkes, A. (2025). Getting into the flow – what do we know now, 15 years since CLANDESTINO? In D. Kierans & A. Kraler (Eds.), Handbook on Irregular Migration Data. Concepts, Methods and Practices (pp. 93-104). University of Krems Press. https://doi.org/10.48341/g31s-vq79.