A new database for studying the international migration in Colombia: methodology and comparative results

Joaquin Recaño Valverde, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Myriam Cifuentes Noyes, Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE)
Jacqueline Martínez García, Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE)
Marta Roig, United Nations
Carolina Sánchez Barriga, Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE)

International migration constitutes the weakest point with regards to demographic information. In a great deal of countries these do not have statistical records on international migration, and the data they use generally comes from censuses that are carried out in ten-year intervals which are unable to capture cyclical changes of international migration. The purpose of this paper is to present the methodology and results of a new source of information on international migration flows in Colombia which is being developed by the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE) under the agreement with the Unidad Administrativa Especial Migración Colombia. This new source consists of individual records collected by the MIGRACIÓN COLOMBIA at border controls by air, land and sea. With this information, the DANE produces an estimate of the outmigration and immigration flows. The new database contains demographic information (sex, and date of birth), geographic information (country of nationality,birth and residence), socioeconomic data (occupation, purpose of travel), and the legal status of travellers (type of visa). Due to the special geographical location of Colombia, nearly 90 percent of the entries and departures with origin or destination to other countries are carried out through air transport, which ensures a high degree of coverage of this source, especially when trying to identify those return movements that are not detected by the statistical systems of the countries of origin. The data used in this study comes from the 41,683,460 international trips flows in the period 2004-2010. An anonymization process has undergone so as to allow the reconstruction of individual information on the travel itineraries of 10,461,355 people for the same time period. The development of the methodology and the reconstruction of the migration flows (comparing them with those registered in countries like Spain and Colombia) are some of the aspects discussed in this paper.