Immigration Statistics

Immigration issues are high on the national policy agenda. But there have been repeated indications that statistics that could inform key debates are lacking, misleading, or otherwise inadequate. This report discusses (1) policy-related information needs for immigration statistics; (2) federal statistics (and information gaps) on the full range of demographic concepts relevant to immigration policy decisions and what is known about the quality of these statistics; and (3) strategies to improving immigration statistics.

GAO noted that: (1) Congress periodically makes decisions about numerous immigration policies; (2) thus, informed decisionmaking by congressional committees and members of Congress as well as interested members of the general public, requires information on immigration flow, by legal status; (3) Congress also decides on the eligibility of the foreign-born for government benefits and services--with different benefits typically allowed or restricted for different categories of the foreign-born population; (4) GAO identified 33 discrete categories of demographic information that could be relevant to congressional decisionmaking; (5) information on immigration flow is reported in annual Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Statistical Yearbooks; (6) statistics on demographic categories other than flow are reported in a more scattered fashion; indeed, a variety of INS and Bureau of the Census publications, including the INS Web page, must be accessed in order to retrieve basic information; (7) INS records that are maintained for administrative purposes are the basis for most federal statistics on flow; (8) these statistics describe the number of new legal permanent residents, new refugees and asylees, and new naturalized citizens; (9) as reported in the INS Yearbook, however, these statistics are limited by conceptual problems and confused reporting, undercounts, and information gaps; (10) the number of new asylees--persons granted asylum--and the number of persons granted citizenship are undercounted in the Yearbook tallies because the data omit certain groups of persons; (11) statistics for other demographic categories are not available; (12) while Census provides some information on the size of the resident foreign-born population, annual net change in size, and emigration, Census has not quantitatively evaluated these data with respect to coverage, accuracy of reported place of birth, or nonresponse rates; (13) there are no separate Census data on legal status because none of the surveys ask questions about legal status; (14) INS has made efforts to fill information gaps for some legal statuses by using the limited data that are available and creating assumption-based models; (15) GAO attempted to identify existing strategies or develop new ones to improve immigration statistics; (16) GAO devised a new method for collecting survey data on the legal status of foreign-born respondents; and (17) GAO also identified strategies for evaluating survey data on the foreign-born.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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