06. New Immigrant Survey, Princeton University

• In Event: 265 - Research Funding Opportunities and Data Resources (part of the Research Support Forum)

Abstract

The New Immigrant Survey (NIS) is a multi-cohort prospective-retrospective panel survey of new legal immigrants to the United States based on probability samples of administrative records from the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services. The NIS provides new kinds of data that will help answer many of the important questions about immigration and concomitantly shed light on basic aspects of human development. The main objective is to provide a public-use database on new legal immigrants to the United States and their children that will be useful for addressing scientific and policy questions about migration behavior and the impacts of migration. Two rounds of interviewing have now been completed.

The first full cohort (NIS-2003-1) was sampled during May through November of 2003, yielding data on 8,573 Adult Sample respondents, 810 sponsor-parent of the Sampled Child, 4,915 spouses, and 1,072 children aged 8-12. The baseline survey was conducted from June 2003 to June 2004. The geographic sampling design takes advantage of the natural clustering of immigrants. It includes all top 85 Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) and all top 38 counties, plus a random sample of MSAs and counties. A follow-up interview with 2003 cohort was conducted from June 2007 to October 2009 (NIS-2003-2). The number of completed interviews with main sampled immigrants in the Adult Sample was 3,902, there were 351 parents of sampled child immigrants, 41 now-adult main child, and 1,771 spouses. Data from the first full cohort and follow-up interviews are publicly available from the project website:
http://nis.princeton.edu.

Interviews were conducted in the respondents' language of choice. Round 2 instruments were designed to track changes from the baseline and also included new questions. As with the Round 1 questionnaire, questions that were used in social-demographic-migration surveys around the world as well as the major U.S. longitudinal surveys were reviewed in order to achieve comparability. The NIS content includes the following information: demographic, health and insurance, migration history, living conditions, transfers, employment history, income, assets, social networks, religion, housing environment, and child assessment tests.

Author

• Monica Espinoza Higgins, Princeton University