Migration policy indexes

In the framework of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, great attention is paid to migration and to 'planned and well-managed migration policies' (SDG 10.7). To compare policies across time and space, indexes can be devised measuring and aggregating relevant indicators of these policies. As one of the activities of the migration policies research line carried out by the EC Knowledge Centre on Migration and Demography (KCMD), this technical report maps and analyses migration policy indexes, explaining their methodologies and accounting for their main findings. Recently, there have been several undertakings at systematically coding and comparing policies over time and across countries. A map of these initiatives will provide some clarity, allowing for a comparison and guidance for their use. Some of the research questions addressed in this report are 'What databases are available for the analysis of migration policies in each country?', 'What kind of policies are analysed?', 'What methodologies have been used? The report focuses primarily on immigration (admission) policies, as this is the area. A further distinction is on sectoral indexes dealing exclusively with single policy areas (e.g. asylum, or labour migration), and more recent comprehensive efforts to fully account for a wide spectrum of asylum and migration policies that are typically adopted by States. This report outlines not only the advantages and disadvantages of the methodologies and explanatory power of these indexes, but can also be of help to policy makers in analysing individual countries' migration management systems, to compare and evaluate the various policy initiatives that have been enacted in the past and which are still likely to have relevance for current migratory challenges. In a nutshell, the added value of the study can be summarized as follows: - To provide clarity on several research undertakings developed so far; - To allow for comparisons and guidance for the use of the various indexes; - To detect gaps and best practices in the methodologies; - To produce a meta-database of policy indexes as a reference for quantitative analyses of policies; - To interpret trends and changes in migration policies over time; - To support analyses and historical comparisons of countries' overall migration management, or of specific policies.