Immigration Statistics

The quality of immigration statistics has been a long-standing concern of experts in the public and private sectors. The National Academy of Sciences issued two reports in which it made recommendations aimed at improving the collection and management of immigration statistics. The recommendations were directed to various groups, including Congress, the Justice Department, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and the Census Bureau. GAO provides information on the implementation status of the reports' major recommendations to Congress, the agencies, and OMB. GAO's summarizes the National Academy of Science's recommendations and discusses what actions Congress, the agencies, and OMB took in response to the 13 major recommendations in the 1985 report and all six recommendations in the 1996 report.

GAO noted that: (1) the recommendations in the 1985 and 1996 NAS reports proposed a range of corrective actions to address concerns about unreliable immigration statistics; (2) generally, the 1985 recommendations focused on changing policies and procedures for processing immigration statistics, and the 1996 recommendations emphasized collecting more immigration statistics from new sources; (3) specifically, the 1985 NAS report included 13 major recommendations that action be taken to: (a) improve the process for collecting and reporting immigration statistics; (b) issue policy statements regarding the importance of producing quality and timely immigration statistics; and (c) reorganize the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and increase INS' staff to improve its immigration statistical capabilities; (4) all six 1996 NAS recommendations focused on the perceived need to collect more immigration data from additional sources, such as the Bureau of the Census' Current Population Survey; (5) GAO determined that some actions had been taken to implement most of the 19 recommendations; the majority of the recommendations were fully, substantially, or partially implemented; (6) specifically, GAO determined that: (a) three recommendations in the 1996 report had been fully implemented; (b) four recommendations in the 1985 report and one recommendation in the 1996 report had been substantially implemented, which means the actions taken were not in compliance with the technical aspects of the recommendations, but the actions were generally responsive to and consistent with the recomendations' purposes; (c) five recommendations in the 1985 report and two recommendations in the 1996 report had been partially implemented; and (d) three recommendations in the 1985 report had not been implemented; (7) agency officials were developing plans to implement one of the three recommendations during fiscal year 1998; and (8) GAO did not categorize one of the recommendations to the Attorney General because it was basically the same as another recommendation but directed to INS.