Estimating irregular migrants from social media data

A persistent challenge in official population statistics is accurately estimating the size of “hard-to-reach” population groups—particularly irregular migrants, who are often underrepresented in administrative records. The Horizon Europe project Measuring Irregular Migration (MIrreM) has introduced innovative approaches to address this issue, including the use of social media data for estimation (Rodríguez-Sánchez & Tjaden, 2025).This project builds on those foundations with the aim of further developing and refining the methodology proposed by Sánchez and Tjaden (2025). The goal is to enable the regular application of this approach across all EU member states, thereby improving the reliability and comparability of irregular migrant stock estimates throughout Europe. Project coordinator: Sogeti (Luxemburg)