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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of

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ISBN 978-0-309-44445-3 | DOI 10.17226/23550

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Francine D. Blau and Christopher Mackie, Editors; Panel on the Economic and
Fiscal Consequences of Immigration; Committee on National Statistics; Division
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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

Panel on the Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

Francine D. Blau and Christopher Mackie, Editors

Committee on National Statistics

Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education

A Report of

Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

10

Research Directions and

Data Recommendations

A detailed review of the research literature upon which this report is

built reveals that much is known about the economic and fiscal impacts of
immigration. A rich portrayal of the roles that immigrants have played in
recent U.S. economic history can be drawn, and short-run labor market
and public finance outcomes can even be forecast reasonably well (Kerr
and Kerr, 2013). But even with the theoretical and empirical advances of
recent decades, some questions remain difficult to answer comprehensively
and accurately. In some cases, research is constrained by a still emerging
conceptual clarity; more often, however, it is hindered by data limitations.
Data on immigrants and their descendants—on nativity, education, age and
date of arrival, time spent in the United States, and legal status at present
and upon entry—are central to analyses of the economic and fiscal impacts
of immigration.
In this chapter, the panel recommends next steps for improving the
data infrastructure necessary to support continued advances on the research
topics detailed in this report. The data needed to study fiscal and economic
impacts of immigrants are similar to the data needed to study their inte-
gration into society. Therefore, many of the recommendations presented
here previously appeared in the report by our sister panel, The Integration
of Immigrants into American Society (National Academies of Sciences,
Engineering, and Medicine, 2015, hereafter “the Integration report”). In
addition to presenting formal recommendations, we identify several oppor-
tunities to enhance available data but do not formally recommend them.
While these data would be valuable to researchers, they do not rise to the

567

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

568 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

same level of importance or their collection may be less feasible than the
data enhancements we recommend.

10.1 COUNTING AND CHARACTERIZING

IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR DESCENDANTS
To understand the effects of immigration on society and the economy,
it is necessary to know how many immigrants have arrived in the country,
when they arrived, and from where. As discussed in Chapter 2, answers to
these seemingly basic questions can be surprisingly difficult to obtain and
will continue to be so without further improvement of data sources. Every
Decennial Census from 1850 to 2000 included a question on birthplace
(foreign-born respondents were also asked about country of birth), which
allowed the size of the foreign-born population to be measured. Data on
the foreign-born are also collected by the American Community Survey
(ACS), a large household survey that replaced the long-form Decennial
Census after 2000, and, since 1994, the Current Population Survey (CPS),
which is designed for the primary purpose of monitoring labor market
trends. These data sources provide information about basic demographic
and socioeconomic characteristics—age, sex, marital status, employment
status, occupation, income, earnings, and educational attainment—of the
foreign-born. The foreign-born population includes permanent residents,
persons on temporary work and student visas, and undocumented residents
who entered the country either without inspection or have overstayed
visas; however, neither the CPS nor the ACS identify the legal status of
respondents. The Census Bureau also produces population projections that
estimate the future size of the foreign-born population based on a set of
demographic assumptions.1
Although it is important to build into the nation’s statistical infrastruc-
ture the capacity to monitor progress of the foreign-born population, it is
equally critical to do so for their U.S.-born children who, as native-born
citizens, reveal a great deal about how new Americans are integrating into
society and helping to shape the nation’s economic and demographic land-
scape. The ability to identify second generation respondents is extremely
desirable for empirical analyses of both labor market and fiscal impacts
of immigration. As with the foreign-born themselves, their children may
on average attain different education and skill levels (often higher—see
1 Because of the inconsistences in the Decennial Census series and the lack of counts of the

second generation population, the Pew Research Center also produces projections, including
separate projections for the second and third-plus generations, which are used for some of the
fiscal impact estimates in Chapter 8 of this report. The Pew population series differs slightly
from official census data because of methods of adjustment, estimation, and projection, but
the differences are generally less than 1 percentage point, well within the margin of error.

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 569

Chapter 8), achieve different occupational outcomes, and generate at least

slightly different fiscal impacts compared with the general population. In
turn, their presence may affect employment rates and composition (either
positively or negatively), as well as per capita earnings, taxes paid, and
social program utilization—all integral to fiscal and labor market outcomes.
Thus, for analyzing the earnings and occupational integration of immi-
grants and their descendants, and for a range of other research purposes, a
question on parental birthplace is needed for a large representative sample
of the population. Such a question was first added to the 1890 Decennial
Census2 but was dropped for the 1980 and subsequent Decennial Censuses.
In 1994, the CPS helped to ameliorate the situation by adding two ques-
tions about parental birthplace: “In what country was your father born?”
and “In what country was your mother born?” The CPS is, however, not
exactly comparable to the Decennial Census or to the ACS; it only cov-
ers the civilian, noninstitutionalized population, and it includes data on
a different set of potential covariates. Massey (2010) provides a definitive
discussion of immigration measurement issues and explains why a question
about parents’ birthplace is crucially needed on the ACS. In so doing, he
also notes the primary constraint inherent in the relatively small sample size
of the CPS (compared to the ACS or the long-form Decennial Census): the
CPS sample size is often inadequate to address questions about immigrants
by nationality groups, and the problem is intensified for smaller geographic
areas.3 As Massey (2010, p. 128) notes, the CPS allows one to “study
second-generation Mexican immigrants in California, but is of little use if
one seeks information about second-generation Koreans in Oregon—the
sample will just be too small.” For cases in which the CPS is inadequate for
studying subgroups, the ACS would often provide the sample size needed
to do so. For this reason, and others cited above, a modification to the ACS
is warranted:

2 From 1890 through 1930, parental birthplace questions were asked of all census respon-

dents. With the advent of sampling in the 1940 census, these questions were asked only to a
subset of the population: for every 20th person (5%) in the 1940 census, for every 5th person
(20%) in the 1950 census, for 25 percent of households in the 1960 census, and for 15 percent
of households in the 1970 census.
3 The relevant part of the CPS (the March supplement) has a sample size of around 75,000

households, which yields, on average, information on more than 11,000 foreign-born house-
holds and 26,000 foreign-born individuals. The March supplement also significantly overs-
amples Hispanics and, to a lesser degree, Asians. A list of all the surveys that collect data
on immigration can be found at the University of California, Berkeley, Population Center.
Available: http://www.popcenter.berkeley.edu/resources/migration_data_sets/data_by_region.
php [November 2015].

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

570 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

Recommendation 1: The U.S. Census Bureau should add a question

on the birthplace of parents to the American Community Survey.4

With such an enhancement to the ACS, fiscal analyses such as those

reported on in Chapter 9 of this report would be more robust because
more characteristics of the foreign-born and the second generation could
be compared against the rest of the population at the state or substate level.
During this panel’s work estimating the fiscal impact of immigration,
it also became clear that, in addition to asking about parental birthplace,
it would be useful to have data on parents’ educational attainment. The
absence of this information even in the CPS, which includes information
on parental birthplace, means that both The New Americans (National
Research Council, 1997) and the analyses in this report (Chapter 8)—along
with many other studies—must rely on average intercohort education lev-
els (a comparison of the mean values for different cohorts), a simplifying
assumption that affects a large research literature, not just that on immi-
gration. If microdata existed to compare individuals and their parents,
estimates of intergenerational transmission of educational attainment and
the determinants thereof would be much more precise.

Recommendation 2: As a first step toward addressing the issue

of intergenerational transmission of educational attainment, the
Current Population Survey should ask respondents about parents’
educational attainment as a follow-up to the existing questions
about parental birthplace.

As discussed below, some research questions about immigrants and

their descendants are best addressed by tracking populations over a num-
ber of years. Longitudinal studies of the second generation are needed to
provide information about their economic and social contributions, about
their labor market and fiscal impact, and about how they integrate along
various dimensions over time—essential aspects of the country’s overall
immigration experience. Past academically sponsored efforts, such as the
New Immigrant Survey (Jasso et al., 2006), have attempted to do this, but
that particular survey was limited to legal immigrants arriving in certain
years. A survey similar to the National Education Longitudinal Studies, but
focused on a large second generation sample followed from early adoles-
cence into adulthood, would enhance immigration research.5

4 This recommendation is replicated from the Integration report (p. 429, Recommendation

10-1).
5 Detailed, individual-level data of this kind, often required for capturing and analyz-

ing processes as they unfold, require safe access that protects privacy and confidentiality.

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 571

In addition, the Integration report recommends that a number of cur-

rently operating national longitudinal surveys “should oversample the
foreign-born, especially the smaller Asian and non-Mexican Hispanic
groups that, when combined, make up a significant share of the immigrant
population.” Existing models of how to oversample key populations can be
found in a range of surveys, such as the National Health Interview Survey,
the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, and the National Health and Nutri-
tion Examination Survey (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine, 2015, p. 432).

10.2 INFORMATION ON LEGAL STATUS

A second major limitation of Decennial Census, ACS, and CPS data
for studying immigration is that neither current visa status nor visa status
at time of arrival are recorded, making it impossible to distinguish between
lawful permanent residents (“green card” holders), persons on temporary
nonimmigrant visas for work or study, persons with other types of visas,
and persons who lack an official visa. As a result, it is common statistical
practice to refer to the foreign-born population in a census or survey as
“immigrants” even though such a categorization will typically include for-
eign students, various workers on temporary employment visas, those on
temporary residence visas, and migrants who are not authorized to be in the
country.6 For this reason, better data are needed on visa status, initially and
currently, as well as on time and age at arrival (which is already collected).
There is considerable mobility across visa categories as well, and cur-
rent visa status does not always predict who stays permanently. Legal sta-
tus has been shown in a number of surveys to be a dynamic variable that
changes over time, as immigrants’ circumstances change. As highlighted
in the Integration report (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering,
and Medicine, 2015, p. 430), “The attainment of legal status and eventual
citizenship are likely to be crucial steps in the process of economic and
social integration, yet researchers presently lack the means to model them.”

Such protections are a feature of the U.S. Census Bureau’s Federal Statistical Research Data
­Centers, which enable researchers—albeit with some level of burden relative to public access
sources—to a­ ccess and analyze microdata and small-area data (for details, see http://www.
census.gov/fsrdc).
6 There are many types of temporary visas that permit people to reside (and sometimes

work) legally in the United States—usually for 1 year or less, although some temporary visas
can be renewed for several years. Temporary resident visas are issued for visitors; fiancés and
spouses of U.S. citizens; entertainers, athletes, and religious workers; Canadian and Mexican
professionals; business trainees; and others that are allowed to reside in the United States for
short periods of time. See Chapter 3 of the Integration report for details on the various visa
and other statuses for temporary and long-term entry to the United States.

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

572 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

Because there is no official count of persons who are in the United States
without a valid visa—the unauthorized population7—an additional ques-
tion should be considered for the CPS:

Recommendation 3: The U.S. Census Bureau and the Bureau of

Labor Statistics should test and, if feasible, add a question on
the monthly Current Population Survey that allows respondents
to select among various well-defined legal statuses at entry or at
present, leaving those in undocumented status to be identified by
process of elimination.8

Following this guidance provides a good starting point but undocu-

mented persons are likely to be under-enumerated in surveys and censuses.
The purpose of the recommended pretest is to determine whether the inclu-
sion of such questions might have a deleterious effect on survey participa-
tion. For these reasons, in addition to the “process of elimination method”
suggested in the above recommendation, creative use of administrative and
other kinds of data is desirable to identify immigrant populations of inter-
est, such as the authorized and nonauthorized.9
It is also possible to tap into legalization programs to learn more about
the subset of immigrants applying for citizenship. As an example of how
this opportunity has been exploited in the past, the Integration report cites
the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which mandated
a survey of immigrants who legalized. The survey, which collected data on
“how they entered the United States, where they fit into the labor market,
demographic characteristics, family composition, use of social services,
migration behavior and origins . . . illuminated the behavior of a population
for which there previously was little systematic information” (Integration
report, p. 430). The potential of this kind of instrument points to a clear
strategy for additional systematic data collection:

7 The expert consensus is that the unauthorized population peaked at approximately 12

million in 2007, then fell to about 11 million in the wake of the Great Recession (Baker and
Rytina, 2013; Passel et al., 2013).
8 This recommendation is adapted from the Integration report (p. 430, Recommendation

10-2).
9 Van Hook et al. (2014) presented evidence about coverage of the Mexican-born population

in the 2000 U.S. Decennial Census and in the ACS using death and birth registrations and a
net migration method. “For the late 1990s and first half of the 2000–2010 decade, results in-
dicate that coverage error was somewhat higher than currently assumed but had substantially
declined by the latter half of the 2000–2010 decade . . . [and] 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” (Van Hook et al., 2014, p. 699).

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 573

Recommendation 4: Congress should include a provision in the

next immigration bill to survey the undocumented population.
Data should be collected in two ways: USCIS [U.S. Citizenship
and Immigration Services] should collect data on applicants who
were previously out-of-status or entered without inspection, and
government statistical agencies should conduct surveys similar to
those conducted after the Immigration Reform and Control Act.10

Legalization programs certainly create targeted opportunities to learn

more about individuals who were previously living without legal status in a
way that provides a window on the broader group; however, it is important
for data users to recognize that those who legalize are a selected group that
is not fully representative of their counterparts who have not legalized.
Currently, data on legal immigrants entering the United States and
those applying for benefits such as naturalization collected by the Depart-
ment of Homeland Security (including USCIS), the State Department, and
the Office of Refugee Resettlement are generally limited to data items
needed for processing cases. The collection of additional information would
make it possible to maximize the research value of these administrative data
and to allow specific questions of interest to be addressed.

Recommendation 5: Data on naturalizations (for which the Depart-

ment of Homeland Security has a record of every case) should be
linked with the data on admissions. Similarly, data on attaining
lawful permanent resident status should be linked to the indi­
vidual’s temporary visa history. This would make it possible to
monitor how individuals progress through the immigration system.

Additional data, such as on occupation and education, could be col-

lected from all applicants for lawful permanent resident status. Information
on family members admitted at the same time could be linked and infor-
mation on sponsors added. These additional data items could be collected
from a sample of the people processed every year. A 10 percent sample
of the admissions/naturalizations each year, for example, would generate
a dataset with about 100,000 awards of lawful permanent residence and
75,000 naturalizations every year. Of course, as pointed out in the Integra-
tion report (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,
2015, p. 431), such an expansion in administrative data collection only
creates value if the information can be made available to researchers and
the public in secure data centers.

10 This recommendation is adapted from the Integration report (p. 431, Recommendation

10-4).

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

574 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

Understanding of the unauthorized and other immigrant populations

could be further enhanced by exploiting longitudinal data sources. This
panel supports the idea behind the recommendation advanced in the Inte-
gration report (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine,
2015, p. 430) to add questions about legal status to a select set of longitu-
dinal surveys that contain significant numbers of foreign-born respondents.
The New Immigrant Survey, the Survey of Income and Program Participa-
tion, and the Los Angeles Family and Neighborhood Study are examples
of surveys that include direct questions on legal status. This modification
could be considered for the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, the National
Health Interview Survey, the National Education Longitudinal Survey, and
the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. However, careful
pretesting would be needed to assess the potential impact on response rates
overall, and of undocumented immigrants in particular, of asking respon-
dents about legal status. The integrity of these very important surveys
should not be risked unless it can be convincingly established that eliciting
truthful answers about legal status from respondents will not create undue
risks to the entire enterprise.

10.3 MEASUREMENT OF IMMIGRATION

AND EMIGRATION PATTERNS
Longitudinal data are also essential for uncovering the correlates of a
range of social and economic outcomes of immigration (National Research
Council, 1996). Likewise, the ability to follow individuals and cohorts over
time is crucial to understanding factors behind geographic movements—
for example, those affecting emigration, circular migration, and interstate
migration—and analyzing selection effects associated with these behaviors
(in this case, the factors or characteristics that are causally linked with
immigration and emigration). Given that the earnings, tax payments, or
program use of those who stay are systematically different from those who
leave, measures of return and circular migration are especially important
for estimating long-term economic impacts.11
For the same reasons, longitudinal data that are valuable for tracking
changing legal status of individuals, return or circular migration, or changes
in patterns of program use are also essential for projecting fiscal impacts
with precision. In their discussion of return migration, Kerr and Kerr
(2011) pointed out that analyses of fiscal impacts often assume that immi-

11 The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ceased publishing emigration data in

1958 because the data available were thought to be incomplete, but alternative estimates based
on recent research suggest that current emigration levels are not insignificant (Van Hook et
al., 2006).

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 575

grants remain permanently in the host country after arrival; public service
use and taxes paid are then estimated on the basis of cross-sectional pat-
terns. The authors conclude that, in order to “provide a better estimate of
the mean effect and also characterize the heterogeneity in immigrant types,”
calculations of both labor market and fiscal impacts need to consider rates
of return migration and identify selective outflow (Kerr and Kerr, 2011,
p. 69). This advice is followed in the forward-looking fiscal projections pre-
sented in Chapter 8, which incorporate population projections by the Pew
Research Center that include adjustments to account for out-migration.12
Better data on remittances would also enhance immigration research.
Remittances dampen the contribution of immigrants to aggregate demand
in the host country while stimulating aggregate demand in the origin coun-
try into which the funds flow; by extension, some fiscal benefits in the host
country attributable to immigrants may likewise be weakened (Kerr and
Kerr, 2011). If questions on respondents’ own and parental nativity were
added to an existing survey, such as the Survey of Consumer Finances and
the Consumer Expenditure Survey, the resultant data could prove useful
for refining understanding of spending and remittance behavior among
immigrants. The fiscal accounting exercises in Chapters 8 and 9 build in
adjustments to account for the impact of remittances on consumption and
sales taxes paid; however, these adjustments were based on data for Ger-
many because adequate U.S. data were unavailable.

10.4 EXPLOITING MULTIPLE DATA SOURCES

For a wide range of information needs underpinning immigration
research, strategic linking of administrative datasets—on visa status for
example—and other sources beyond traditional household surveys can
greatly enhance the capacity to track variables of interest, particularly at
the individual level, over time. USCIS and other federal agencies compile
administrative data containing detailed information about immigrants,
including flows of new arrivals by visa status and data on newly natural-
ized U.S. citizens. However, the published data are aggregated in a way
that offers only very basic cross-tabulations. It is impossible to use these
data for fine-grained analyses, which typically require micro-level data on
individuals and the ability to link to additional information sources, such
as aggregate data on localities.

12 The cumulative return rates used in the analysis are segmented by age and by duration

in the United States. The return rate is about .24 for immigrants in their first 10 years in the
country and about .31 during the first 50 years after arrival. These estimates are within a per-
centage point or two of the return rates used in the forward looking fiscal analysis presented
in The New Americans (National Research Council, 1997).

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

576 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

Sometimes key pieces of information cannot be gleaned from household

surveys. An example, used in the estimation of state and local fiscal impacts,
is the cost of bilingual education and of educating students for whom Eng-
lish is a second language (not necessarily in a bilingual education program).
The costs of such programs cannot be estimated from a household survey
because they are incurred by schools, not parents. The source of data used
in this report for modeling the added costs for language-assistance instruc-
tion is a now fairly outdated study by the Urban Institute (Clark, 1994).
Updated information would be useful for sharpening estimates of education
costs associated with immigration.
Beyond the survey data realm, another action that would be useful for
generating fiscal projections would be for the Congressional Budget Office
to make its budget projection engine public and give users the ability to
experiment with different scenarios to see how changes affect estimated
fiscal flows, tax rates, the size of the national debt, etc. For federal fiscal
estimates, such as those produced in Chapter 8 of this report, this capability
would have provided the opportunity to generate additional scenarios and
to flesh out more exhaustively how reasonable each one appears. Achiev-
ing this is a complex proposition, but the capability would benefit research
projects estimating future fiscal impacts of various policies—immigration
related or otherwise.
Exploiting multiple data modes also has the potential to advance
research on employment dynamics. To quantify the mobility of workers,
or the extent to which displacement of pre-existing workers occurs, longitu-
dinal data that “measure layoffs, unemployment spells, changes of residence
and occupational and industrial mobility” are critical (Longhi et al., 2008,
p. 25). Record linkages between surveys and detailed administrative records
are now available to study firm and worker interactions and status changes.
For the United States, the pioneering Longitudinal Employer-Household
Dynamics Program13 has proven highly useful for analyzing how labor
markets adapt to changing circumstances and, in so doing, has expanded
opportunities for more sophisticated studies of employment effects associ-
ated with immigration inflows.14 In general, research in the United States
has more frequently examined wage impacts than employment effects;
European scholars have given more attention to analyzing employment
impacts.15 Foged and Peri (2015) analyzed labor market outcomes of low-

13 For details, go to http://lehd.ces.census.gov/research.

14 Mouw et al. (2012) and Rho (2013) examined worker displacement in high immigration
industries using evidence from the Longitudinal Employer-Household Dynamics Program.
15 As reviewed in Chapter 5, there has been some work in the United States on employment

impacts. Smith (2012) analyzed the impact of immigration on hours worked of low-skilled
native-born workers and found that the largest negative effect was on teenagers.

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 577

skilled natives in response to an inflow of low-skilled immigrants using

longitudinal employer-employee data from Denmark.
Another area in which multiple data sources could advance research
on the impact of immigration on wages and employment is in measuring
capital formation. As discussed in Chapter 5, the demand for labor and
the capacity of the economy to absorb new workers, including immigrants,
is strongly influenced by the speed at which firms invest and adjust their
capital stock and production technologies. Assumptions are often made
or implied about this process which, in certain kinds of models, strongly
influence wage and employment impact estimates. At this point, there is
little empirical basis for these assumptions because the temporal character-
istics of how capital formation occurs in response to changing factors of
production is an under-researched topic (Longhi et al., 2008, p. 25). Better
microdata on investment and capital stock at industry and regional levels
are needed and might be supplemented by a variety of non-survey-data
sources such as firm administration records or commercial databases.
Long-term multisource data projects are also important for studying
economic and social mobility—a topic that has recently gained heightened
visibility among researchers, policy makers, and the general public. Con-
cerns about growing income and wealth inequality and about the health of
the “American dream” have spurred research into intergenerational issues,
which often have even more acute implications for immigrants and their
descendants. The Integration report points out that “matched individual-
level records from Decennial Censuses (and the ACS) with income data
from Internal Revenue Service and the Social Security Administration would
allow for longitudinal studies of the socioeconomic progress of immigrants
in American society and allow for the measurement of both intracohort
change and intercohort change (for cohorts based on time of arrival in the
United States) for successive waves of immigrants.” Additionally, “matched
Census and USCIS records would allow for in-depth studies of pathways to
legalization and also the impact of legal status on socioeconomic outcomes
of individuals and their children”16 (National Academies of Sciences, Engi-
neering, and Medicine, 2015, p. 431). This opportunity should be pursued:

16 Similar data are collected in the French Permanent Demographic Sample (EDP), which is

a pioneering longitudinal database maintained by the French National Institute of Statistics

and Economic Studies, a central government agency located in Paris. The EDP is a panel
survey based on immigrant arrival and census data that comprises a 1 percent sample of all
immigrants that have entered France since 1967. The panel database includes information on
immigrants at the time of arrival, linked to the General Population Census of 1968 and later
censuses. It provides a rich database on the social and economic adjustment of immigrants
over recent decades. A study by Richard (2013) provides an example of the usefulness of EDP
data for studying labor outcomes.

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The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

578 THE ECONOMIC AND FISCAL CONSEQUENCES OF IMMIGRATION

Recommendation 6: The U.S. Census Bureau and U.S. Citizenship

and Immigration Services should create a system that links admin-
istrative data to Census Bureau–administered surveys, including the
Decennial Census, the American Community Survey, and the Sur-
vey of Income and Program Participation, following protocols that
have recently been used to link Internal Revenue Service data to
Census Bureau data and/or following protocols developed for the
American Opportunity Study (National Research Council, 2013).17

The American Opportunity Study (AOS) is a new project, still under

way, that takes as its goal to digitize and link data across Decennial Cen-
suses, the ACS, and other administrative sources (such as Internal Revenue
Service datasets) for the purpose of studying social mobility and related
topics such as the following (Grusky et al., 2015):18

• Parent-child social mobility across a variety of dimensions (income,

education, occupation) and with repeated measurements
• Social mobility within small geographic units
• Three-generation analyses (and beyond)
• Subgroup analyses (e.g., immigrants from specific countries or
regions)
• Study of complex families (distinguishing social, biological, and
financial parents)
• Intergenerational inheritance of program participation

A key topic motivating the AOS project is to improve the measurement of

intergenerational changes in the immigrant population, ultimately improv-
ing the evidence base for policy.
Due to its high profile and its centrality among policy issues, research
will continue on immigration regardless of whether the changes recom-
mended in this chapter are implemented, and much of the focus of this
research will be on the fiscal and economic consequences topics covered in
this volume. However, initiatives such as the AOS and others that create
a coordinated data infrastructure will, if successful, greatly enhance these

17 This recommendation is replicated from the Integration report (National Academies of

Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015 p. 431, Recommendation 10-5).

18 The linkages across Census Bureau and administrative data will be designed to promote

social, behavioral, and economic research in a way that creates savings on survey costs, im-
proves data accuracy, and increases the ability to understand the long-term consequences of
economic and social change. A longitudinal panel of the population, with identifiers for im-
migrants and later generations, could be constructed, and research using it could be conducted
in restricted data environments such as the Census Bureau’s Research Data Centers (National
Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, 2015).

Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS AND DATA RECOMMENDATIONS 579

research efforts. In this chapter, the panel has briefly identified next steps for
pushing the knowledge frontier forward so that a report published 20 years
from now will be able to present an even more comprehensive assessment
of how immigration contributes to the economy and affects those engaged
in its activities.

Copyright National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.