departures from the UK is a weakness in asylum data and migration data generally in the UK. Outward migration is only estimated by the International Passenger Survey , which does not accurately discern whether the departing person originally came to the UK for work, study, family, or asylum. Outward migration is not counted in administrative data. The Home Office has begun to use passenger data from airlines and other sources to try to track previously unknown departures, but even this improvement may not yield complete coverage. Thus, estimates of asylum's role in net migration are uncertain, as total outflows can only be guessed. The Office of National Statistics assumes the departure of some percentage of asylum seekers in its widely-used estimate of Long-Term International Migration, or LTIM, as in Figure 1 (ONS 2008: 10-11). Official data have at least one other key omission. Dependents arriving in the UK after the initial decision on the main applicant are counted in entry statistics as dependents, but are not distinguished as dependents of asylum-seekers or refugees. Similarly, dependents are counted in settlement statistics only if they were granted settlement at the same time as the main applicant they accompany (ICAR 2009). Thus, we cannot accurately capture the total number of people coming to the UK with asylum seekers, as some may arrive later to join a successful applicant. An additional note: most published administrative data count the number of events in a given month, quarter, or year. Thus, data for a given time