Researchers are increasingly interested in the role of undocumented status in immigrant economic, social, and health outcomes. A major obstacle to this work is that detailed immigration status is not widely collected in representative data sources. Some secondary data sources collect enough information to identify immigrants without a green card (non-LPRs), and researchers take different approaches to assign undocumented status to immigrants within this population. These approaches have not been compared to one another, nor do we know if they work equally well for Latino and Asian immigrants. In this research note, we test the validity of several assignment strategies using the 2001, 2004, and 2008 panels of the restricted version of the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) to measure differences in health-related outcomes (e.g., health insurance coverage and self-rated health) by immigration status. We compare results when immigration status is directly measured using the detailed information in the SIPP to several strategies to assign undocumented status among non-LPRs. The probabilistic approach produced the smallest biases, but Asian immigrants had larger biases compared to Latinos across all strategies.

研究人员对无证件身份在移民的经济，社会和健康结果中的作用越来越感兴趣。这项工作的主要障碍是，在代表性数据源中并未广泛收集详细的移民身份。一些辅助数据源收集了足够的信息来识别没有绿卡（非LPR）的移民，研究人员采用了不同的方法来为该人口中的移民分配无证件身份。这些方法尚未相互比较，我们也不知道它们对拉丁美洲和亚洲移民是否同样有效。在本研究报告中，我们使用收入和计划参与调查（SIPP）的受限版本的2001、2004和2008面板测试了几种分配策略的有效性，以衡量与健康相关的结果的差异（例如，健康保险范围和自我评估的健康状况）。我们将使用SIPP中的详细信息直接测量移民身份时的结果与几种在非LPR中分配无证件身份的策略进行比较。概率方法产生的偏见最小，但在所有策略中，与拉丁美洲人相比，亚洲移民的偏见更大。