New Immigrant Survey Series

The New Immigrant Survey (NIS) is a nationally representative multi-cohort longitudinal study of new legal immigrants and their children to the United States based on nationally representative samples of the administrative records, compiled by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), pertaining to immigrants newly admitted to permanent residence.

Legal immigration plays a central role in American society with it contributing to one-third of the United States' population growth. Despite this significance, it has become evident that there is little information and data pertaining to legal immigrants. This study hopes to fill in the gap of information by presenting itself as a useful tool for immigration policy and processes. At the same time, the study hopes to also benefit legal immigrants themselves by taking their concerns into consideration and seeing to it that they are addressed.

The NIS Project website includes an overview of the design of the study, preliminary findings, details on the research team, and links to papers and publications associated with the NIS data.

Primary Investigators (PIs): Guillermina Jasso (NYU), Douglas Massey (Princeton), Mark Rosenzweig (Yale), and James Smith (RAND Corporation)

NIS is supported by the National Institutes of Health (NIH)/ National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)/ National Institute on Aging (NIA)/Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research (OBSSR) under grant HD33843, the National Science Foundation (NSF) under grants SRS-9907421 and SES-0096867, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (now the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services). Additional support was provided by the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE) and the Pew Charitable Trusts. This collaborative research project spans four institutional settings - RAND, Princeton University, New York University, and Yale University.

NIS Round 1 was conducted in 2003-2004. NIS Round 2 was conducted in 2007-2009. The Version 2 data for both rounds of NIS are available exclusively in the ICPSR VIrtual Data Enclave (VDE). If you are interested in working with the Version 1 and Version 2 data together, please contact DSDR to coordinate your restricted data application materials.