Citizenship Reporting in the American Community Survey

BACKGROUND: Citizenship status among the foreign born is a crucial indicator of social and political incorporation, yet there are good reasons to suspect that citizenship status is inaccurately reported on U.S. surveys. OBJECTIVE: This paper updates research carried out in the mid-1990s by Passel and Clark (1997) on the extent to which foreign-born non-citizen respondents in U.S. government-sponsored surveys misreport as naturalized citizens. METHODS: We compare demographic estimates of the resident naturalized foreign-born population in 2010, based on administrative data, to estimates from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS). RESULTS: Similar to previous research, we find that misreporting in the ACS is especially high among immigrants from all countries/regions who report fewer than five years in the U.S. We also find that among longer-term foreign-born residents, misreporting is concentrated only among those originating in Mexico, especially men, a finding that diverges from Passel and Clark in that we find no evidence of over-reporting among immigrants from Central America and the Caribbean. Finally, the estimated magnitude of misreporting, especially among longer-term Mexican-born men, is sensitive to assumptions about the rate of emigration in our administrative-based demographic estimates, and assumptions about coverage error in the ACS, though altering these assumptions does not change the conclusions drawn from the general patterns of the results. CONCLUSIONS: For applications that use citizenship as an indicator of legal status, we recommend that self-reported data on citizenship be accepted at face value for all groups except those with less than five years of U.S. residence and Mexican men.