New Immigrant Survey

• In Event: 3201 - Research Funding Opportunities and Data Resources Presentations: Session II

Abstract

The New Immigrant Survey (NIS) is a nationally representative, multi-cohort, longitudinal study of new legal immigrants to the United States and their children. It provides new kinds of data, available for public use that will help answer many of the important questions about migration and its impacts and also shed light on fundamental aspects of human development.
The sampling frame is based on the electronic administrative records compiled for new legal permanent residents (LPRs) by the U.S. government (via, formerly, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and now its successor agencies, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) and the Office of Immigration Statistics (OIS)).
Thus, for the first time, the NIS obtains longitudinal information on nationally representative cohorts of new legal immigrants. Two rounds of interviewing have 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.
The NIS has released a subset of the data on Mexican immigrants included in the two round surveys. The baseline interviews include 1,165 Mexican adult immigrants, 99 parents of sampled Mexican child immigrants, and 683 spouses of sampled immigrants and Round 2 interviews had successfully completed 557 of the original adult respondents, 44 parents, and 280 spouses. Data from the first full cohort, follow-up interviews, and Mexico NIS 2003 data files are publicly available at: http://nis.princeton.edu.

Author

• Monica Espinoza Higgins, Princeton University