Immigrants by reason for immigration

Name: Immigrants by reason for immigration
Topic: Population

Division for Population Statistics

The base data are on person level and can technically be distributed on all regional levels. Confidential considerations determine the regional level to be used in each case.

Yearly

Statistics on reasons for immigration are required by international statistics organisations such as Eurostat, the UNECE and the OECD.

Collected and revised data are stored securely by Statistics Norway in compliance with applicable legislation on data processing.

Statistics Norway can grant access to the source data (de-identified or anonymised microdata) on which the statistics are based, for researchers and public authorities for the purposes of preparing statistical results and analyses. Access can be granted upon application and subject to conditions. Refer to the details about this at Access to data from Statistics Norway.

The system for assuring the quality of Norwegian official statistics is based on quality requirements in the Statistics Act and in the European Statistics Code of Practice.The annual report on the quality of official statistics assesses compliance with the quality requirements for all official statistics as a whole.

The National programme for official statistics sets the framework for the areas Statistics Norway and other public authorities produce statistics on. The programme defines and outlines official statistics.

Further information about the system for quality in official statistics can be found at ssb.no

The main purpose of the statistics is to provide an overview of the most important reasons for persons to migrate to Norway. In addition, the data can be used to classify a part of the foreign-born population by original reason for immigration.

The first statistics were published on 10 March 1995 (Ukens statistikk nr. 10, 1995), comprising first- time immigrations in the period 1990-93. The statistics were continued only as statistics on refugees until 30 November 2006.

The statistics on persons with a refugee background were published for the first time in 1999 as Dagens statistikk (Daily Statistics), Refugees 1 January 1998. It is not meant to replace the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration's statistics on decisions and legal grounds. The figures are not necessarily in agreement with the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration's statistics on decisions and legal grounds.

The general public, general government, research institutes and the media.

No external users have access to statistics before they are released at 8 a.m. on ssb.no after at least three months’ advance notice in the release calendar. This is one of the most important principles in Statistics Norway for ensuring the equal treatment of users.

The population consists of foreign-born non-Nordic citizens registered as resident in Norway in the Norwegian Population Register for the first time in 1990 or later.

This population is part of the immigration and emigration statistics as well as the statistics on foreign-born. However, the population has not been treated as a separate group or marked in any way in those statistics.

Refugee as a reason for immigration deviates from the definition of refugee used in the refugee statistics in two ways: Firstly, only people with "refugee" as the main reason is assigned this reason for immigration. People who reunite with refugees are therefore not included, as they are (for the time being) in the statistics on refugees. The other difference is that the variable reason for immigration does not take into consideration that some people become a refugee after the first immigration.

The statistics are developed, produced and disseminated pursuant to Act no. 32 of 21 June 2019 relating to official statistics and Statistics Norway (the Statistics Act).

The statistics are included in the national programme for official statistics, under the main domain Population and the sub-domain Immigrants.

Statistics are available from 1990 onward.

Data on refugee as reason for immigration: Foreign-born registered in the Population Register (i.e. all persons that are or have been resident in Norway since 1 October 1964, and/or was included in the 1960 Population and Housing Census (as of 1 November 1960)).

Data on the other reasons for immigration: Foreign-born that immigrated to Norway for the first time in 1990 or later, as non-Nordic citizens.

In the published tables there is an extra requirement for the limitation of the population. The persons in question have to be immigrants (i.e. born abroad to foreign-born parents).

The most important data sources are the Central Population Register (CPR) in the Directorate of Taxes, and the Aliens Register (Utlendingsdatabasen UDB) in the Norwegian Directorate of Immigration.

The CPR is the most important data source in Statistics Norway's population statistics system. In addition, data from the 1960 and 1970 population censuses are included as a supplement. The same applies to older statistical files which originate from population register data. The definition of first-time immigrations is based on CPR data alone.

In 2004, UDB replaced the Fremkon register (the old Aliens register) and the Refugee Register. Central information from these two registers were adapted to new standards and included in UDB. As a result, UDB now contains data going back to 1991, several years before UDB was introduced in the handling of cases.

The single most important variable in UDB for the statistics is reason for decision . If the information on that variable is missing, other similar variables are used.

An important supplementary source is the 2004 edition of the file for reason for immigration produced in 1995 and updated by use of data from the Refugee Register. It covers the persons that do not have satisfying information in UDB.

The population register data have been processed. The new focus in the processing leading to reason for immigration is the task to achieve the best linkage possible between the ID number in UDB and Personal Identification Number, and subsequently to find the first reason for immigration for as many foreign-born as possible.

The process of obtaining a linkage between the two ID number series is based on links that are found both in UDB and CPR. These links are controlled, linked and compared, and improved considerably. The result is a common definition of the persons in the two input data sets.

When this task is accomplished, the next step is to find the information in UDB that, as best as possible, states the reason for the first immigration event registered in the CPR.

One challenge in this connection is that most persons are registered with several cases (even if most of them are just renewals), and that the information may differ from case to case. In many cases the most specific information is found on some of the later cases registered on a person. For some persons this comprehensive information is copied to the former cases.

Another challenge is to identify the case which most probably is related to the first immigration registered in the CPR. There are no variables in UDB that make it possible to pick out the most relevant case in all cases.

The main principle is that the reason for immigration is taken from the last registration before the immigration was registered in the CPR, but there are exceptions if the actual case does not provide sufficient and reliable information. In these cases other registrations or sources are used as indication of the reason for immigration.

One of these supplementary sources is the file of reason for immigration produced in 2006. That year the task was resolved by finding the most relevant case for each of the main reasons, and then make a choice between these reasons (for persons with more than one main reason). The choice was based on the main reason which is seen as the most reliable in each case. In reality, the reason for immigration refugee was chosen before the others.

In case of missing source of reason for immigration imputations are made, based on variables like citizenship and age at the immigration. In general, there is a greater need for imputations in the older data (from the beginning of the 1990s and earlier) than in data registered in the new UDB system (started in 2004).

In this process, some children without their own reason for immigration get a value from their parents.

The problems with varying reliability may have the effect that some persons are allocated e.g. Refugee as the reason for immigration in stead of Family, as would have been the result if the registrations had been more complete.

The next challenge is to identify the most probable reference in Norway (the "resident person") in family immigration cases. If this reference is not stated in the UDB data, CPR information on relationships is used to find the spouse, children, parents or siblings that possibly may have been the reference at the first immigration. In this process spouse takes precedence over the other categories. The method identifies persons that may have been the reference for foreign-born. However, the method does not guarantee that the identified person actually and legally was the reference.

The construction of a variable called "type of family unification" (distinguishing between reunification, accompanying person and formation/extension) also causes several challenges, both concerning missing data and conceptual difficulties. The classification is mainly based on assessments of dates of immigration and marriage (when relevant) of both the immigrant and the reference person, and on registrations of that variable in the UDB data. The determination of limit values used in the classification is based on assessments.

Since 2014, immigrations with delayed information to the UDI are included in the statistics. Historical figures might differ slightly due to the new practice.

Controls and revisions are carried out at all stages of the processing.

Editing is defined here as checking, examining and amending data.

Interviewers and everyone who works at Statistics Norway have a duty of confidentiality. Statistics Norway has its own data protection officer.

Statistics Norway does not publish figures where there is a risk of identifying individual data about persons.

The 'rounding up/down’ method is used in these statistics to ensure this.

More information can be found on Statistics Norway’s website under Methods in official statistics, in the ‘Confidentiality’ section.

It is difficult to achieve comparability between countries, since no countries have fully comparable statistics. However, the statistics from Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands do have certain similarities with the Norwegian.

Historical figures can be changed in some cases due to delayed or new information to the UDI. Thus, the latest updated figures in the Statbank might differ slightly compared to previously published figures.

There is a considerable amount of uncertainty related both to the input data and the processing in Statistics Norway.

The processing includes imputations and decisions which may be debatable. New information in the future may lead to the correction of errors made on an earlier occasion.

Any measuring and processing errors are not expected to have any severe impact on the main results, but may be visible on lower levels.

Errors and uncertainties are more common in the oldest data (especially in 1990).

Nordic citizens do not need a residence permit, and hence they are not registered in UDB. There are not enough supplementary data available to allocate a reason for immigration to all Nordic citizens. Norwegian citizens are partly in the same situation, and therefore not included.

A revision is a planned change to figures that have already been published, for example when releasing final figures as a follow-up to published preliminary figures. See also Statistics Norway’s principles for revisions.