Reuters Great Debate Web site published a cosigned op-ed by Nancy Birdsall and OECD secretary general Angel Gurria on migration data.
From the op-ed:
"All financial crises end. The question is not if we will recover, but how we can build a resilient global economy to speed and bolster that recovery. While many immediate dangers remain, now is the time to look beyond the exigencies of today.
We must take a hard look at weaknesses in the international system that might stand in our way as we rebuild. There are several, but we take this opportunity to highlight one weakness in our ability to build a resilient global economy for the future: the inadequate state of comparable data on international migration.
This is our biggest weak spot on globalization. While many countries collect and publish detailed data on who legally enters or leaves their territory, they do not do it in the same way. In consequence, it is difficult to know clearly and to compare across countries how many persons immigrate and emigrate, for how long and for what reason. Strangely, it is much easier to get a good picture of global movements of textiles and Treasury Bills than global movements of human beings. Vast disparities in income per head between countries mean that small changes in labor mobility may have large effects on the global economy. But we cannot begin to manage such changes well if the community of nations is not counting even legal migrants in the same, systematic way."