The use of personal names for screening is an increasingly popular sampling technique for migrant populations. Although this is often an effective sampling procedure, very little is known about the properties of this method. Based on a large German survey, this article compares characteristics of respondents whose names have correctly been classified as belonging to a migrant population with respondents, that are migrants and whose names have not been classified as belonging to a migrant population. Although significant differences with large effect sizes in some cases could be found, the overall bias introduced by name-based sampling seems to be small as long as procedures with a small false-negative rate are used.