Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

In the past 50 years, the United States has experienced unprecedented growth in the foreign-born population. Given that the foreign-born account for 14 percent of the total US population, immigration is currently one of the most important mechanisms for population growth and change. With increasing diversity by immigrant legal status, unauthorized immigrants are disproportionately represented in poorer socioeconomic status categories. While previous literature has examined dimensions of medical and food hardship, no extant literature describes the extent to which immigration status influences economic well-being across a range of well-being dimensions. Furthermore, research on the immigrant population, especially on undocumented immigrants, faces data and measurement challenges: there are a limited number of datasets that have information on the place of birth and citizenship status in the public-use files. Moreover, due to the sensitive nature of the question, specific legal status of an immigrant is difficult to identify.

Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) spanning more than a decade (1996-2008), this study explores the relationship between immigrant legal status and the experience of material hardship in seven individual measures of housing, medical, dental, utility, food, and essential expenses hardship. The wave 2 Migration Topical Module of the SIPP has migration questions common to all large-scale Census surveys, such as country of birth, year of arrival, and citizenship, and includes items about immigrant respondents’ visa status upon arrival and at the time of the survey. We use this information to disaggregate the foreign-born sample by legal status. We employ probit models estimating the probability of experiencing each form of material hardship controlling for the demographic characteristics described above and year fixed effects.

Preliminary results reveal a legal status gradient irrespective of hardship outcome. Unauthorized immigrants experience the highest rates of hardship on every outcome and naturalized immigrants experience the lowest. This is the first study of its kind to identify material hardship levels and determinants for unauthorized immigrants.

Results from this study will inform policy-makers by documenting how nativity and legal status impact economic well-being using more nuanced measures than previous work, exploring how patterns have changed over time, and describing how much of the differences in material hardship status is explained by demographic and economic characteristics such as education level and income level.