Complementary Administrative Data for the Understanding of International Migration, Dual Nationality and Naturalization in Mexico.

Víctor M. García-Guerrero, El Colegio de Mexico
Claudia Masferrer, El Colegio de México, A.C. Centro de Estudios demograficos, Urbanos Y Ambientales

Although recent studies have increasingly analyzed the use of administrative and digital data to complement the use of census and surveys for estimating and nowcasting international migration, the knowledge of the characteristics of migrant populations with alternative data is still limited. In the context of high mobility, populations might access multiple citizenships over time. Dual nationality is not free of challenges in the collection of migration statistics, and as more people have more than one citizenship, these challenges will increase. How many foreign-born are also Mexican nationals? How many Mexicans born abroad and naturalized live in Mexico, and what are their basic socio-demographic characteristics? What do different data sources tell us about these populations in Mexico? How could we overcome data limitations? We use administrative data to study naturalizations and dual nationality in Mexico and compare it to gold-standard census data. Here, we analyze, for the first time, data from the 2020 Mexican Census, vital statistics of births, as well as data on naturalizations accessed due to a public request of information, and restricted-access data from General Catalogue of Voters from the National Electoral Institute. Our findings stress the complementarity of data sources and potential avenues for demographic research.

Keywords: International Migration, Migrant Populations and Refugees, Big data, Census data

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