Conducting Descriptive and Analytical Research with the Immigration and Naturalization Service Public Use Tapes

Abstract

For many years the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) has published annual data on persons admitted to the U.S. as legal resident aliens. Only relatively recently has INS begun to make its microdata files available. This paper concerns the INS Public Use Tapes, including a detailed description of the information available on them, an account of the frequency and severity of certain flaws in the data, and a discussion of possible methods for correcting these flaws. The paper also discusses a number of strengths and weakness of the data for descriptive and analytical research, and it provides several suggestions for research projects that could be carried out with the INS data.