Comparing the Effectiveness of Assignment Strategies for Estimating Likely Undocumented Status in Secondary Data Sources for Latino and Asian Immigrants

Annie Ro () and Jennifer Hook ()
Additional contact information
Annie Ro: UC Irvine Program in Public Health
Jennifer Hook: Pennsylvania State University

Population Research and Policy Review, 2022, vol. 41, issue 2, No 3, 449-464

Abstract: Abstract Researchers are increasingly interested in the role of undocumented status in immigrant economic, social, and health outcomes. A major obstacle to this work is that detailed immigration status is not widely collected in representative data sources. Some secondary data sources collect enough information to identify immigrants without a green card (non-LPRs), and researchers take different approaches to assign undocumented status to immigrants within this population. These approaches have not been compared to one another, nor do we know if they work equally well for Latino and Asian immigrants. In this research note, we test the validity of several assignment strategies using the 2001, 2004, and 2008 panels of the restricted version of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to measure differences in health-related outcomes (e.g., health insurance coverage and self-rated health) by immigration status. We compare results when immigration status is directly measured using the detailed information in the SIPP to several strategies to assign undocumented status among non-LPRs. The probabilistic approach produced the smallest biases, but Asian immigrants had larger biases compared to Latinos across all strategies.

Keywords: Undocumented immigrants; Asian immigrants; Simulations; Health insurance; Survey of income and program participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11113-021-09658-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:poprpr:v:41:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s11113-021-09658-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... es/journal/11113/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11113-021-09658-3

Access Statistics for this article

Population Research and Policy Review is currently edited by D.A. Swanson

More articles in Population Research and Policy Review from Springer, Southern Demographic Association (SDA)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().