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Title: Credible Interval Estimates of the Size and Legal Composition of the US Foreign-Born Population
Citation Type: Working Paper
Publication Year: 2021
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Abstract: Government agencies and academic researchers typically report the size and legal composition of the foreign-born population as point estimates. As these estimates are generally produced using survey data, they are impacted by both sampling and nonsampling error. This paper considers nonsampling error due to item nonresponse in the estimates of the size and legal composition of the foreign-born produced using the American Community Survey. The standard practice to deal with item nonresponse is to impute values under the assumption that nonresponse is conditionally random. We follow a procedure that allows us to form credible interval estimates that make no assumptions about the values of missing data by taking into account all uncertainty due to item nonresponse. Without any assumptions on the distribution of citizenship status among non-respondents, the size of the foreign-born population in the US falls somewhere between 40.4 and 59.4 million as of 2019 compared to the Census estimate of 44.9 million. When taking into account item nonresponse from all questions used in the imputation procedure to assign legal status, the size of the undocumented population fall between 7.3 and 18.3 million compared to the widely accepted estimate of 11 million undocumented immigrants.
Url: https://www.andresmira.net/uploads/1/3/9/3/139339841/mira_bollinger_credibleestimates.pdf
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Authors: Mira, Andres Felipe; Bollinger, Christopher R.
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Institution: University of Kentucky
Pages: 1-67
Publisher Location: Lexington
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Methodology and Data Collection
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