U.S. LEGAL IMMIGRANTS AT ADMISSION 127 Demography, Volume 37-Number 1, February 2000: 127–138 127 THE NEW IMMIGRANT SURVEY PILOT (NIS-P): OVERVIEW AND NEW FINDINGS ABOUT U.S. LEGAL IMMIGRANTS AT ADMISSION * GUILLERMINA JASSO, DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, MARK R. ROSENZWEIG, AND JAMES P. SMITH gal immigrants who make up the U.S. foreign-born popula- tion. The lack of pre-immigration and lifecourse information for immigrant cohorts hinders understanding of the integra- tion of immigrants, the roles of the selection criteria of U.S. immigration law, and the selectivity that governs who are im- migrants and who are not. The New Immigrant Survey Pilot (NIS-P) is a first at- tempt to resolve these problems. In this paper we describe the survey and report findings from its baseline data on adult immigrants (those age 18 or over at admission to permanent residence). We summarize our experience in locating and in- terviewing the immigrants who were sampled, and we assess the representativeness of the resulting sample of interviewed adult immigrants. We also report selected findings based on data obtained from the 1,130 adult-immigrant respondents. OVERVIEW OF THE NEW IMMIGRANT SURVEY PILOT Despite the importance of immigration in this country’s past, present, and future, there has never been a nationally repre- sentative sample of new legal immigrants designed to follow their progress over time. Instead, research on immigration has been limited to relatively small special surveys of se- lected immigrant populations or has been based on those im- migrants who happen to be included in mainstream social science surveys. Although useful demographic and economic research has been conducted using these traditional sources, they are inherently limited as a basis for firm scientific in- ferences about the immigration experience. In addition, stud- ies derived from the standard national data sources—the Cur- rent Population Surveys (CPS), decennial censuses, the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), the set of National Lon- gitudinal Surveys (NLSs)—have serious deficiencies for im- migration research. The first of these deficiencies is that two of the major databases used to study immigration, the census and CPS, are cross-sectional surveys; thus, key dynamic aspects of immi- gration for individual migrants cannot be investigated at all. Second, except in the census, the sample sizes available to study immigrants are problematic given the substantial heterogeneity among immigrants in many dimensions. When the research focus turns to subgroups of immigrants—for example, immigrants born in Mexico, South America, Viet- nam, or Russia—the sample sizes available severely limit analysis. Third, existing surveys omit much relevant data about immigrants. In particular, they contain no indication of the This paper provides an overview of the New Immigrant Survey Pilot (NIS-P), a panel survey of a nationally representative sample of new legal immigrants to the United States based on probability samples of administrative records of the U.S. Immigration and Natu- ralization Service (INS). The NIS-P links survey information about immigrants’ pre- and post-immigration labor market, schooling, and migratory experiences with data available from INS administrative records, including the visa type under which the immigrant was ad- mitted. Results indicate that the procedures followed for locating, interviewing, and reinterviewing respondents yielded representative samples of new legal immigrants and high-quality data. On the basis of data obtained from the first round of the survey, we present new information never before available on the schooling and language skills of new immigrants and their earnings gains from immigration. mmigration affects American society in profound ways. Yet in perhaps no other area of demographic and social science research has there been such a persistently large gap between information needs and existing data. Consequently, many fundamental questions remain unanswered. Among these are the following: How has the health and skill composition of entry cohorts of immigrants changed over time? How do the schooling and initial earnings of new legal immigrants com- pare with those of the U.S. native-born, foreign-born, and illegal immigrant populations? How large is the economic gain from becoming a legal immigrant? How many immi- grants return to their home country? How do transitions be- tween legal and illegal statuses occur? What are the contri- butions of immigrants to the American society and economy? How complete is their eventual assimilation? Although useful for many purposes, existing demo- graphic and economic databases providing information on the foreign-born population of the United States have impor- tant deficiencies. Among the more serious are no informa- tion on the legal status of the U.S. nonnaturalized foreign- born, no information on the pre-immigration experiences of immigrants, and the inability to follow a given cohort of im- migrants over time. The first deficiency makes it impossible to distinguish the very different experiences, contributions, and costs of legal immigrants, legal nonimmigrants, and ille- I * Guillermina Jasso, Department of Sociology, New York University, 269 Mercer Street, 4th floor, New York, NY 10003; E-mail: jasso@ is3.nyu.edu. Douglas S. Massey, Department of Sociology and Population Studies Center, University of Pennsylvania. Mark R. Rosenzweig, Depart- ment of Economics, University of Pennsylvania. James P. Smith, RAND. This research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (NICHD and NIA) under Grant HD33843, with partial support from the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the National Science Foundation. Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article-pdf/37/1/127/884876/127jasso.pdf by guest on 09 May 2022