Quantitative Data Availability and Measurement of U.S. Immigrant and Immigration Policies: IMR Methods Note

In this IMR Methods Note, we spotlight the rise in quantitative data availability, measurements, and scholarly investigations of U.S. 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 non-immigrant populations in the U.S. To conclude, we discuss ongoing challenges and future opportunities for deepening research on U.S. 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 U.S. 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 non-random variation in how IIPs take shape across space and time.