Quantitative Data Availability and Measurement of US Immigrant and Immigration Policies: IMR Methods Note

By Abigail Weitzman, Julia Behrman, Marta Ascherio

 In this IMR Methods Note, we spotlight the rise in quantitative data availability, measurements, and scholarly investigations of US immigrant and immigration policies (IIPs). To begin, we offer a detailed account of the quantitative data sources, measures, and analytical strategies that have been developed by scholars studying IIPs over the last two decades. We then highlight this scholarship’s important advances toward identifying IIPs’ intended, unintended, and spillover effects on immigrant and nonimmigrant populations in the United States. To conclude, we discuss ongoing challenges and future opportunities for deepening research on US IIPs and their psychosocial, behavioral, and health implications. Our review illuminates how data on federal immigration enforcement activities, and on federal, state, and municipal immigrant laws have engendered
increasingly sophisticated quantitative studies of the US IIP climate. At the same time, it highlights several dimensions in which existing work stands to be strengthened, including the need for comparisons of newly developed IIP measures and their estimated effects; greater exploration of IIPs’ potentially heterogeneous effects across distinct subpopulations; and more attention to endogeneity, or in other words, the political and demographic processes that give rise to nonrandom variation in how IIPs take shape across space and time.