Where can I find data on foreign born and native born workers by industry for the years 2010-2014

Where can I find data on foreign born and native born workers by industry for the years 2010-2014

Two IPUMS products provide data on foreign/native born population and industry. The first source is IPUMS USA (which provides US Census and ACS data). The NATIVITY variable identifies native or foreign born individuals, in pre-1970 samples. For post-1970 samples, the BPL variable can identify native born (BPL<120) and foreign born (BPL>120 & <999) individuals. The LABFORCE and IND variables can identify workers by industry.

The second source is IPUMS CPS (which provides data from the Current Population Survey). The NATIVITY variable identifies native or foreign born individuals in ASEC samples. The LABFORCE and IND variable can identify workers by industry.

Dear Jeff,
I am looking at BPL variable to generate foreign-born and US-born population since 2000. It looks like the category for those who are US born without specific state information does not exist after 1970’s. Is it okay to assume that no one belongs to the US-NS in recent years (likely to be very rare)?

Yes, the US-NS category was not used after 1970. In cases where a state was not specified, it was imputed by the Census Bureau. You can identify these cases using the data quality flag QBPL, which can also be found on the Flags section for BPL.

Thank you, Matthew. I used BPL and generated nativity variable. We initially used ACS PUMS downloaded data before we learned about IPUMS. For a few years (2011-2015), we happened to run both PUMS (using “Nativity” variable) and IPUMS and are puzzled because IPUMS gives us more for foreign-born and less US-born compared to PUMS (We ran this for Asian subgroups). Can you help us to learn any difference between PUMS Nativity variable and IPUMS BPL variable (cut at 120)?

The NATIVITY variable in the original PUMS files counts as “native” people who were born in the United States or were born abroad to US-Citizen parents, and thus were automatically citizens at birth. You can see this by comparing the source variable US2015A_NATIVITY with CITIZEN in IPUMS USA. I believe the mismatch you were seeing was people born outside of the United States who were classified as “native” by NATIVITY. If you crosstab BPL with CITIZEN, you will see that all of these cases were people born abroad to US-citizen parents.