The 2025 edition of the BRISPO lecture series: Johan Surkyn, VUB | Irregular Migration: Combining Existing Datasets and Demographic Methods to Tackle a Debated Issue
Dr. Surkyn is a sociologist and demographer working at Interface Demography, Vrije Universiteit Brussel for 35 years. His field of expertise stretches from migration and population modelling to housing, household demography and the use of administrative data for social and demographic research. Most recently, he studied the use of life table methods to estimate the size and composition of non-citizen populations in Belgium and in Brussels.
In this lecture, Dr. Surkyn presents an innovative approach to measuring undocumented migration through mortality data linked to population registers. He explores how death registry information from Belgium can create more accurate statistical estimators for hard-to-reach populations that traditional migration statistics often miss. He addresses how this method overcomes common challenges in migration data—incompleteness, outdated information, and lack of standardization—while providing insights into demographics, living conditions, and healthcare access of undocumented migrants.
