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

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.

Recent trends in coverage of the Mexican-born population of the United States: results from applying multiple methods across time.

The accuracy of counts of U.S. racial/ethnic and immigrant groups depends on the coverage of the foreign-born in official data. Because Mexicans constitute by far the largest single national-origin group among the foreign-born in the United States, we compile new evidence about the coverage of the Mexican-born population in the 2000 census and 2001-2010 American Community Survey (ACS) using three techniques: a death registration, a birth registration, and a net migration method. For the late 1990s and first half of the 2000-2010 decade, results indicate that coverage error was somewhat higher than currently assumed but had substantially declined by the latter half of the 2000-2010 decade. Additionally, we find evidence that U.S. census and ACS data miss substantial numbers of children of Mexican immigrants, as well as people who are most likely to be unauthorized: namely, working-aged Mexican immigrants (ages 15-64), especially males. The findings highlight the heterogeneity of the Mexican foreign-born population and the ways in which migration dynamics may affect population coverage.

(Un)Healthy immigrant citizens: naturalization and activity limitations in older age.

This research argues that immigrants' political, social, and economic incorporation experiences, which are embedded in individual life course trajectories and heavily influenced by governmental policies, play an important role in producing diverse health outcomes among older U.S. foreign-born persons. Using data from the 2008-2010 American Community Survey and 1998-2010 Integrated Health Interview Series, we demonstrate how naturalization, a key indicator of social and political inclusion, is related to functional health in midlife and older age. Consistent with the theoretical framework, we find that among those foreign-born who immigrated as children and young adults, naturalized citizens show better health at older ages compared with noncitizens, although this relationship is partly mediated by education. But among those older foreign-born who immigrated at middle and older ages, naturalized citizens report worse health compared with noncitizens. Moreover, this negative health selection into naturalization becomes stronger for those naturalizing after the 1996 Welfare Reform Act.

The educational legacy of unauthorized migration: comparisons across U.S.-immigrant groups in how parents' status affects their offspring.

This research compares several national-origin groups in terms of how parents' entry, legalization and naturalization (i.e., membership) statuses relate to their children's educational attainment. In the case of Asian groups, the members of which predominantly come to the United States as permanent legal migrants, we hypothesize (1) that father's and mother's statuses will be relatively homogenous and few in number and (2) that these will exert minimal net effects on second-generation attainment. For Mexicans, many of whom initially come as temporary unauthorized migrants, we hypothesize (1) that parental status combinations will be heterogeneous and greater in number and (2) that marginal membership statuses will exert negative net effects on education in the second generation. To assess these ideas, we analyze unique intergenerational data from Los Angeles on the young adult members of second-generation national-origin groups and their parents. The findings show that Asian immigrant groups almost universally exhibit similar father­mother migration statuses and high educational attainment among children. By contrast, Mexicans manifest more numerous discrepant father­mother combinations, with those in which the mother remains unauthorized carrying negative implications for children's schooling. The paper discusses the theoretical and policy implications of the delays in incorporation that result from Mexican Americans needing extra time and resources compared to the members of other groups to overcome their handicap of marginal membership status (i.e., being more likely to enter and remain unauthorized).

EXPLAINING THE DISTINCTIVENESS OF MEXICAN-IMMIGRANT WELFARE BEHAVIORS: THE IMPORTANCE OF EMPLOYMENT-RELATED CULTURAL REPERTOIRES.

Social scientists generally seek to explain welfare-related behaviors in terms of economic choice, social structural, or culture of poverty theories. Because such explanations incompletely account for nativity differences in public assistance receipt among those of Mexican origin, this paper draws upon the sociology of migration and culture literatures to develop alternative materialist-based cultural repertoire hypotheses to explain the welfare behaviors of Mexican immigrants. We argue that immigrants from Mexico arrive and work in the United States under circumstances fostering employment-based cultural repertoires that, compared with natives and other immigrant groups, encourage less welfare participation (in part because such repertoires lead to faster welfare exits) and more post-welfare employment, especially in states with relatively more generous welfare-policies. Using individual-level data predating Welfare Reform from multiple panels of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP), merged with state-level information on welfare-benefit levels, we assess these ideas by examining immigrant-group differences in welfare receipt, retention, and transition to employment across locales with varying levels of welfare benefits. Overall, the results are consistent with the notion that cultural repertoires incline Mexican immigrants to utilize welfare not primarily to avoid work, cope with disadvantage, or perpetuate a culture of dependency, but rather mostly to minimize employment discontinuities. This result carries important theoretical and policy implications.

THE NEW U. S. IMMIGRANTS: HOW DO THEY AFFECT OUR UNDERSTANDING OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN EXPERIENCE?

The implications of recent immigration for race relations in the United States depend importantly on family cultural orientations among Mexican Americans and how this group is culturally perceived by Anglos. Because Moynihan's 1965 work (in)famously emphasized the need to change black family culture in order to ameliorate black poverty, his work still holds implications for understanding how cultural orientations affect changing color lines. Unfortunately, his partially insightful analyses inadequately foresaw that policies designed to alleviate poverty through the modification of family cultural patterns are likely to fail without parallel changes in structural opportunities. Similar limitations also often emerge from mis-characterizations of Mexican origin family cultural situations, which all too often are incongruously reified as either being unduly familistic (thus falsely implying Mexican origin families foster self-sufficiency) or largely governed by culture of poverty tendencies (thus inaccurately suggesting Mexican origin families depend on welfare). Here we review research suggesting that Mexican origin families are neither substantially familistic nor disproportionately susceptible to moral hazard, thus indicating that future Mexican origin economic advancement is likely to turn on the availability of structural opportunities. In-depth interviews with Anglos further suggest that Mexicans are not culturally viewed with the same degree of prejudice and discrimination as blacks, implying that the integration of Mexicans into American society, contingent on adequate economic opportunity, will probably progress more steadily than often feared, while that of blacks may proceed more slowly than often expected.

Foreign-born emigration: a new approach and estimates based on matched CPS files.

The utility of postcensal population estimates depends on the adequate measurement of four major components of demographic change: fertility, mortality, immigration, and emigration. Of the four components, emigration, especially of the foreign-born, has proved the most difficult to gauge. Without "direct" methods (i.e., methods identifying who emigrates and when), demographers have relied on indirect approaches, such as residual methods. Residual estimates, however are sensitive to inaccuracies in their constituent parts and are particularly ill-suited for measuring the emigration of recent arrivals. Here we introduce a new method for estimating foreign-born emigration that takes advantage of the sample design of the Current Population Survey (CPS): repeated interviews of persons in the same housing units over a period of 16 months. Individuals appearing in a first March Supplement to the CPS but not the next include those who died in the intervening year, those who moved within the country, and those who emigrated. We use statistical methods to estimate the proportion of emigrants among those not present in the follow-up interview. Our method produces emigration estimates that are comparable to those from residual methods in the case of longer-term residents (immigrants who arrived more than 10 years ago), but yields higher--and what appear to be more accurate--estimates for recent arrivals. Although somewhat constrained by sample size, we also generate estimates by age, sex, region of birth, and duration of residence in the United States.

Assessing immigrant policy options: labor market conditions and postreform declines in immigrants' receipt of welfare.

Researchers infrequently have focused on assessing the degree to which the changes in welfare policy legislated during the 1990s have affected immigrants' receipt of welfare. Using data from the March Current Population Survey, we analyze the contribution of local labor market conditions to the explanation of relative declines in immigrants' receipt of welfare from 1994 to 2000. The results of a series of models that included labor market-area and state fixed effects indicate that employment and unemployment rates across metropolitan statistical areas and states account for at least one-third of the observed relative decrease among immigrants. The policy implications of the findings are discussed.