You said at the Belgrade partner meeting that YOUMIG is a real knowledge pool, because partners come with very different backgrounds and expertise. What’s yours?

I am an economist by training, but also a sociologist. I have worked in market research in the past, but I also did social research about young people. Since 2009 I have been working with migration statistics, from 2015 as a department head at the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (HCSO).

What are the challenges in measuring migration? Why is this such a complex area of statistics and research?

Migration was already a target of statistical data collection after World War I, and officials had the same problems that we are faced with now. It is difficult to understand the phenomenon itself, there are many numbers circulating in the media, agreeing even on a single definition of who is a migrant is hard.

But what makes it so hard to agree?

Look, everyone has a family member or friend who is abroad, but nobody thinks about what this means exactly. Who stays for longer than a year, or how many of them come home. For measuring migration, we need to use a lot of administrative data sources, which are usually self-reporting, and can raise issues of reliability, and while place of residence data is often used to count up migrants, these registries can be inaccurate. The EU issued a regulation in 2007 on harmonising migration definitions for statistics, but the picture is still not crystal clear.

I guess working across eight countries in YOUMIG makes this kind of work even harder. Yet you emphasise that this is a transnational project. Is this an important part of the research?

Earlier when we worked on the SEEMIG project (2012-2014), which also dealt with migration, we had two important conclusions. Everyone in general tries to measure and understand migration at a national level, while two other perspectives are also very naturally important: one is that migration must be looked at in a transnational context, requiring close cooperation between countries involved, and the other, that it should be understood better in a local context. Because migration is so hard to measure, it is best to go as close to where it happens, as possible. We must connect sending and receiving countries in this work and also improve data and analysis at the local level.

What drew you to YOUMIG as a researcher?

There are a lot of in-between categories without clear boundaries in migration, which is interesting for a researcher. In statistics, there is always a clear limit, if you meet it, you are put into a distinct group. With migration it is not so easy to define where these cut-off points are, the truth is that people are coming and going. It is this challenge, the new ways of thinking about the phenomenon and what migration means for local communities, is what attracted me to the project. And I am interested in numbers, making better estimations, getting more reliable data, especially at a local level.

Besides the rewards for the scientist, as project manager you have different kind of challenges. Am I right?

Of course, there are challenges. When we talk about migration, we think of all three categories: immigrants, emigrants and return migrants. But for example in some European countries the media uses the word ‘migrant’ to refer to refugees, while migration is a concept with many more layers. Just looking at its direction we can talk about the earlier mentioned three groups, but also there are differences in the time spent abroad and the goal of the migration. There are people who spend a short time abroad for their studies, there are those who take jobs for a longer term, and some are moving to join family members. And there are commuters, near state borders.

Another great thing about this project is that scientific researchers, statisticians and municipal officials are working together, but this is also a great task for coordination. Yet this is what makes it so rich and colourful.

Ádám enjoys walking and mountain trekking in his free time and his one great wish is to cycle along the river Danube with his children.

Interview by Nóra Krokovay

Read more about the YOUMIG project here: http://dtp.interreg-danube.eu/approved-projects/youmig/news