Can We Measure Immigrants’ Legal Status? Lessons from Two U.S. Surveys

Abstract

This research note examines response and allocation rates for legal status questions asked in publicly available U.S. surveys to address worries that the legal status of immigrants cannot be reliably measured. Contrary to such notions, we find that immigrants’ response rates to questions about legal status are typically not higher than response rates to other immigration-related questions, such as country of birth and year of immigration. Further exploration of two particular surveys – the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS) and the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) – reveals that these data sources produce profiles of the unauthorized immigrant population that compare favorably to independently estimated profiles. We also find in the case of the SIPP that the introduction of legal status questions does not appear to have an appreciable “chilling effect” on the subsequent survey participation of unauthorized immigrant respondents. Based on the results, we conclude that future data collection efforts should include questions about legal status in order to (a) improve models of immigrant incorporation and (b) better position assimilation research to inform policy discussions.

Deporting the American Dream: Immigration Enforcement and Latino Foreclosures

“…To estimate county-level unauthorized populations, we employ the data fusion approach developed in Capps et al (2013) that applies correlations between legal status and other characteristics observed in the 2001 Survey of Income and Program Participation to public-use microdata samples (PUMS) from Census 2000 using multiple imputation (see Bachmeier, Van Hook, and Bean 2014;Van Hook et al 2015). This process is used to generate two relevant estimates: the number of unauthorized persons and the percent of unauthorized immigrants living in owner-occupied housing.…”

Hurdles or walls? Nativity, citizenship, legal status and Latino homeownership in Los Angeles

“…These procedures likely encouraged respondents to be more forthcoming regarding nativity, citizenship, authorization to reside in the United States, and other potentially sensitive topics. A recent analysis finds that non-response rates for questions that can be used to identify legal status in L.A.FANS is 4.3% (Bachmeier et al, 2014). Moreover, L.A.FANS data provides estimated profiles of the demographic characteristics of the unauthorized immigrants in Los Angeles that are similar to other estimates derived for Los Angeles (Bachmeier et al, 2014) and are generally representative of Los Angeles (Goldman et al, 2005;Clark and Ledwith, 2006).…”

Considering Cultural Integration in the United States: Empirical Essays on Immigrants' Arts Participation

“…Furthermore, there is now broad acknowledgement that a non-citizen immigrant's legal status significantly affects his or her overall well-being in terms of economics, eligibility to public benefits, and the degree of integration across a range of social outcomes (Bachmeier et al 2014 In this chapter, I first provide further background on why it is necessary to impute non-citizen legal statuses and briefly discuss the merits of available imputation strategies. I then apply an imputation method to the 2008 CPS/SPPA data and investigate whether there are differences in arts participation across citizenship and non-citizens' legal statuses.…”

“…Foreign-born includes anyone born outside the borders of the United States, Puerto Rico, or any of the US' outlying territories, regardless of individual or parental citizenships. 16 The designation foreign-born therefore encompasses a great deal of heterogeneity, including all immigrants as well as native US citizens who were born outside of the US to Empirical evidence from research using the LAFANS, SIPP and other approaches to collecting data on immigrants' legal statuses suggests that reservations about using direct measures may not be as problematic as they once were thought to be and argue for more widespread use of questions enabling more refined investigations of immigrants' legal statuses (Bachmeier et al 2014, Van Hook et al 2015.…”

“…Those who do not exhibit any of the specified characteristics are classified as undocumented. Variables needed to inform the criteria commonly used for the logical approach are available in multiple major nationally representative surveys conducted by the US Census Bureau, including the CPS and the American Community Survey (Bachmeier et al 2014). …”