Estimating international migration flows based on a passenger database: A case study for Colombia

In a great deal of countries do not have statistical records on international migration and the data they use 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 of estimation of a new source of information on international migration flows in Colombia which is being developed by the Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística (DANE) and Migración Colombia. This new source consists of individual records of passengers collected at border controls by air, land and sea. With this information, DANE produces an estimate of the international migration flows. The database contains demographic information and geographic information, socioeconomic data and the legal status of travelers. The data used in this study comes from the 41,683,460 international trips registered in the period 2004-2010. The data have been subjected to a process of anonymization so as to allow the reconstruction of individual information on the travel itineraries of 10,461,355 people for the same time period. The methodology and the reconstruction of migration flows (comparing them with those registered in others countries) are some of the aspects discussed in this paper.