The project tackled the problem of international migration statistics being among the less reliable statistics within the field of socio-economic and demographic data.

Several directions were explored with all 25 EU member states: 1) comparing definitions and concepts related to international migration; 2) analysing available data in order to see what the data already reveals and where the main problems lie in terms of reliability and comparability; 3) integrating data on asylum with data on flows and stocks in order to get more reliable information on de facto international migration within each country; 4) describing and analysing all efforts on bilateral and international levels in order to improve the situation and to identify impact of low reliability and lack of comparability on policy implementation; 5) proposing practical recommendations on possibilities to improve the situation after discussion with all potential data providers and data users for migration policy development.