Can We Spin Straw Into Gold? An Evaluation of Immigrant Legal Status Imputation Approaches

Abstract

Researchers have developed logical, demographic, and statistical strategies for imputing immigrants’ legal status, but these methods have never been empirically assessed. We used Monte Carlo simulations to test whether, and under what conditions, legal status imputation approaches yield unbiased estimates of the association of unauthorized status with health insurance coverage. We tested five methods under a range of missing data scenarios. Logical and demographic imputation methods yielded biased estimates across all missing data scenarios. Statistical imputation approaches yielded unbiased estimates only when unauthorized status was jointly observed with insurance coverage; when this condition was not met, these methods overestimated insurance coverage for unauthorized relative to legal immigrants. We next showed how bias can be reduced by incorporating prior information about unauthorized immigrants. Finally, we demonstrated the utility of the best-performing statistical method for increasing power. We used it to produce state/regional estimates of insurance coverage among unauthorized immigrants in the Current Population Survey, a data source that contains no direct measures of immigrants’ legal status. We conclude that commonly employed legal status imputation approaches are likely to produce biased estimates, but data and statistical methods exist that could substantially reduce these biases.

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.…”

The Effects of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on the Educational Outcomes of Undocumented Students

“…These imputation methods have evolved considerably over the last few decades Cohn 2009, Warren andWarren 2013). However, some authors have shown that these imputations can lead to large bias in some applications (van Hook et al 2015). Recent studies either treat all foreign born residents, including those who are legally authorized to be in the United States (i.e., legal permanent residents or LPRs) as undocumented (Flores 2010;Kaushal 2008;Potochnick 2014) or treat students who hold student visas or who have refugee or asylum status as undocumented (Greenman and Hall 2013).…”

The Changing Family Structure of American Children with Unauthorized Parents

“…10 The Census Bureau and the Department of Homeland Security estimate that nearly 40 percent of non-citizens are authorized immigrants (Acosta et al 2014;Baker and Rytin 2013 Hook et al 2015), as it is the intent of the present study.…”