How Well Does the American Community Survey Count Naturalized Citizens

AbstractBACKGROUNDCitizenship 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.OBJECTIVEThis paper updates research carried out in the mid-1990s by Passel and Clark (1997) on the extent to which foreign-born noncitizen respondents in U.S. government-sponsored surveys misreport as naturalized citizens.METHODSWe 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).RESULTSSimilar 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 United States. We also find that among longer-term foreign-born residents, misreporting is concentrated only among those originating in Mexico, especially men of all ages and older women, a finding that diverges from Passel and Clark in that we find no evidence of overreporting 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.CONCLUSIONSFor 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 fewer than five years of U.S. residence, Mexican men, and older Mexican women.1. IntroductionImmigration and immigrant integration continue to be topics of enormous social significance, particularly for countries like the United States, where immigrants make up 13% of its population. In the context of anti-immigrant policies and attitudes that treat societal outsiders differently, citizenship status among the foreign born is a crucial indicator of social and political incorporation in the United States (Van Hook, Brown, and Bean 2006) and other immigrant-receiving societies (Bloemraad 2006), and is strongly associated with political participation, access to public assistance, health care, and the formal labor market (Passel, Clark, and Fix 1997; DeSipio 2001; Fix and Zimmermann 2001; Van Hook and Balistreri 2006). Citizenship is also a key variable for the production of estimates of the characteristics of the unauthorized foreign-born population (Passel, Van Hook, and Bean 2006). Social scientists and policy analysts therefore rely heavily on survey items on citizenship to answer questions about immigrants, their well-being, and their impact on host societies (Bloemraad, Korteweg, and Yardakul 2008).Given the importance of citizenship for research on immigrants, it is important to assess the accuracy of citizenship reporting in surveys. In the United States, data on naturalization and citizenship largely come from Census Bureau surveys, such as the Current Population Survey (CPS), the long form of the decennial census (2000 and earlier), and the American Community Survey (ACS). Prior research, carried out in the mid-1990s by Passel and Clark (1997), suggests that the number of naturalized citizens is overestimated in census data, possibly because some noncitizens misreport as citizens. We update and extend this work by comparing demographic estimates of the resident naturalized foreign-born population in 2010, based on administrative data, to estimates from the 2010 ACS.2. Prior research and study contributionsIn the United States, immigrants may naturalize after five years of legal permanent residency if they meet the criteria for citizenship (e. …