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 noncitizen 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
United States. We also find that among longer-term foreign-born residents,
misreporting is concentrated only among those originating in Mexico, especially men of
all ages and older women, a finding that diverges from Passel and Clark in that we find
no evidence of overreporting among immigrants from Central America and the
Caribbean. Finally, the estimated magnitude of misreporting, especially among longerterm
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.