Migration statistics in times of large-scale mobility data: ethical concerns and concerns with ethics

Migration research has seen a significant shift in terms of the data sources and methods used. This chapter argues that migration researchers need to engage critically on issues of accuracy and ethics in relation to these innovations. In the chapter we discuss a number of new data sources and highlight how their use involves new, often commercial, actors in migration research. We then comment on the challenges we see in relation to research ethics in times of big data analytics, and why conventional approaches may not be sufficient. We argue for distancing migration research from direct collaboration with policy and vendor agendas, and specifically for critically interrogating what can and what cannot be achieved with more data.