To mark International Migrant’s Day (18 December), the International Labour Organization (ILO) today launched the International Labour Migration Statistics (ILMS) Database for ASEAN. The ILMS Database, which is the first of its kind in the region, provides a coherent and powerful research tool for policymakers and others to profile and monitor the international migrant labour force within the region.

The ILMS Database, created by the Canadian Government-funded ASEAN TRIANGLE Project, gathers together a range of statistical sources relating to international migrants and international migrant workers in the ten ASEAN Member States in order to fill an important knowledge gap. It comes at a critical time for ASEAN as it reaches a major milestone – the creation of the ASEAN Community in 2015. In order to manage and understand international labour migration trends more coherently, the ILMS Database collected relevant, comparable and tractable data, including from a range of previously unpublished sources. The data includes countries' stocks of international migrants and international migrant workers; the corresponding annual inflows of these; and countries' stocks and outflows of nationals abroad.

The development of the database was made possible through the close guidance of the ASEAN Secretariat and the data provided by the ASEAN Committee on the Implementation of the ASEAN Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers (ACMW).

The importance of improved data collection and sharing in this area has been emphasized in recommendations or commitments under the ASEAN Declaration on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of Migrant Workers (2007); the ASEAN Socio-Cultural Community Blueprint (2009); the ASEAN Labour Ministers’ Work Programme, 2010-2015; the 6th ASEAN Forum on Migrant Labour (AFML) (2013); the International Conference of Labour Statisticians (ILO, 2013); and in the ILO’s Report of the Director-General: Fair migration, setting an ILO agenda (ILO, 2014).

The ILMS Database is hosted on ILOSTAT – the world’s leading portal for labour market statistics – as a unique information source, freely available to users online - www.ilo.org/ilostat - under ‘Databases by subject’, ‘Special collections’, ‘International Labour Migration’. The ILMS Database will also be made available through the Asia Pacific Migration Network at http://apmigration.ilo.org/.
 

For further information please contact:

Mr Manuel Imson
Senior Project Coordinator, ASEAN TRIANGLE Project
Email
Tel.:+662 288 2243

Ms Sophy Fisher
Senior Communication Officer & Public Information Officer
ILO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific, Bangkok
Email
Tel.: +668 989 50 921