Integration of immigrants and integration statistics in Central Europe: possibilities and restrains

Attila Melegh, Demographic Research Institute, Budapest

The paper will utilize several recent international and national projects on the integration of immigrants and integration statistics concerning several Central European countries including Austria, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. First it relies on the project of female immigrants in eight EU countries (Femage) and two national projects on the integration of immigrants and the ways this process can be measured and institutionalized into statistics. The paper will consider the typology of migratory spaces as the construction of sending, receiving and migrant actors in these countries. It will consider how migrants see these processes themselves and strategies they follow in maneuvering in these migratory spaces In particular on the basis of more than 50 semi-structured interviews it will concentrate on traps of integration which may hinder a balanced co-existence between migrants and local populations and also on the gender aspect of these processes. At the end it will briefly analyze recent changes in migratory policies in Europe and the demands it makes concerning harmonized statistical measures. it will raise possibilities how such a complex process can be measured and how the problem of measurement is related to the problems of integration as analyzed in the paper.