The Weight of Being Unauthorized? Legal Status Variation in the Association between US Exposure and Obesity among Hispanic Immigrants in Los Angeles.

We examine whether exposure to the US, experienced under certain conditions of disadvantage, namely immigrant legal status, is associated with body weight. Using the pooled, cross-sectional 2001 and 2008 Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Survey (LAFANS) (n = 2063), we examine whether body mass index (BMI) and obesity vary by Hispanic immigrants' legal status and time exposure to the US. The increased risk of obesity associated with greater US exposure is more pronounced among unauthorized Hispanic immigrants compared to their legally resident coethnic peers, after adjusting for age and age-at-arrival. It is not only residing in the US that is associated with increases in body weight, but residing in the US as an unauthorized immigrant. Improved data and methods are needed to facilitate research of greater policy significance and a refined understanding of how health integration processes vary by legal status.

Leapfrogging the Melting Pot? European Immigrants' Intergenerational Mobility across the Twentieth Century.

During the early twentieth century, industrial-era European immigrants entered the United States with lower levels of education than the U.S. average. However, empirical research has yielded unclear and inconsistent evidence about the extent and pace of their integration, leaving openings for arguments that contest the narrative that these groups experienced rapid integration and instead assert that educational deficits among lower-status groups persisted across multiple generations. Here, we advance another argument, that European immigrants may have "leapfrogged" or exceeded U.S.-born non-Hispanic white attainment by the third generation. To assess these ideas, we reconstituted three-generation families by linking individuals across the 1940 Census, years 1973, 1979, 1981-90 of the Current Population Survey, the 2000 Census, and years 2001-2017 of the American Community Survey. Results show that most European immigrant groups not only caught up with U.S.-born whites by the second generation, but surpassed them, and this advantage further increased in the third generation. This research provides a new understanding of the time to integration for 20th century European immigrant groups by showing that they integrated at a faster pace than previously thought, indicative of a process of accelerated upward mobility.

Health Insurance Coverage: Logical Versus Survey Identification of the Foreign-Born.

Estimating rates of public benefit use for lawful permanent residents (LPRs) is difficult given the limited availability of nationally representative data that disaggregate the foreign-born population by legal status. Using the 2008 Survey of Income and Program Participation-the only national survey that distinguishes LPRs from other non-citizens-we employ logistic regression to compare estimates of health insurance coverage for legal immigrants using two methods to infer legal status: (1) a logical approach and (2) a survey-based approach. The logical approach, relative to the survey approach, yields a higher predicted probability of having any insurance for LPRs (adjPP = 0.70) compared to the survey approach (adjPP = 0.57) and a higher likelihood of having public health insurance (adjPP = 0.26 compared to adjPP = 0.09, respectively). These findings suggest that the logical approach may overestimate lawful immigrants' reliance on public benefits, which has implications for conclusions about recent changes to the public charge rule.

The Association Between Legal Status and Poverty Among Immigrants: A Methodological Caution.

Using nationally representative survey data, this research note examines the association between immigrant legal status and poverty in the United States. Our objective is to test whether estimates of this association vary depending on the method used to infer legal status in survey data, focusing on two approaches in particular: (1) inferring legal status using a logical imputation method that ignores the existence of legal-status survey questions (logical approach); and (2) defining legal status based on survey questions about legal status (survey approach). We show that the two methods yield contrasting conclusions. In models using the logical approach, among noncitizens, being a legal permanent resident (LPR) is counterintuitively associated with a significantly greater net probability of being below the poverty line compared with their noncitizen peers without LPR status. Conversely, using the survey approach to measure legal status, LPR status is associated with a lower net probability of living in poverty, which is in line with a growing body of qualitative and small-sample evidence. Consistent with simulation experiments carried out by Van Hook et al. (2015), the findings call for a more cautious approach to interpreting research results based on legal status imputations and for greater attention to potential biases introduced by various methodological approaches to inferring individuals' legal status in survey data. Consequently, the approach used for measuring legal status has important implications for future research on immigration and legal status.

Can we spin straw into gold? An evaluation of immigrant legal status imputation approaches.

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.

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.

How Well Does the American Community Survey Count Naturalized Citizens?

BACKGROUND: Citizenship status among the foreign born is a crucial indicator of social and political incorporation, yet there are good reasons to suspect that citizenship status is inaccurately reported on U.S. surveys. OBJECTIVE: This paper updates research carried out in the mid-1990s by Passel and Clark (1997) on the extent to which foreign-born non-citizen respondents in U.S. government-sponsored surveys misreport as naturalized citizens. METHODS: We compare demographic estimates of the resident naturalized foreign-born population in 2010, based on administrative data, to estimates from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS). RESULTS: Similar to previous research, we find that misreporting in the ACS is especially high among immigrants from all countries/regions who report fewer than five years in the U.S. We also find that among longer-term foreign-born residents, misreporting is concentrated only among those originating in Mexico, especially men, a finding that diverges from Passel and Clark in that we find no evidence of over-reporting among immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean. Finally, the estimated magnitude of misreporting, especially among longer-term Mexican-born men, is sensitive to assumptions about the rate of emigration in our administrative-based demographic estimates, and assumptions about coverage error in the ACS, though altering these assumptions does not change the conclusions drawn from the general patterns of the results. CONCLUSIONS: For applications that use citizenship as an indicator of legal status, we recommend that self-reported data on citizenship be accepted at face value for all groups except those with less than five years of U.S. residence and Mexican men.

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).