What data sources report on immigrants and SNAP participation (CPS, USDA, state agencies)?
Executive summary
Three complementary data streams underpin most research and reporting on immigrants and SNAP participation: survey data (principally the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement, CPS ASEC), federal administrative records compiled by USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) and Economic Research Service (ERS), and state-level administrative data supplied to the federal government and used directly by researchers and state agencies; each source is routinely combined in published estimates but has documented limits, reporting lags and privacy controversies [1] [2] [3] [4].
1. CPS ASEC: the survey denominator and its limits
Researchers commonly use CPS ASEC — the March CPS supplement — to estimate who is eligible for SNAP (the denominator) and to profile immigrant status and household composition, but CPS-based estimates can misstate eligibility because respondents misreport income, immigration status or program participation, and survey-based models require imputations from other sources to fill gaps [1] [5].
2. USDA FNS administrative data: the participation numerator and program statistics
USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service maintains the official counts of SNAP participants and benefits — public-facing “SNAP Data Tables,” monthly and annual program tables, and the annual Characteristics of SNAP Households report — and these administrative records serve as the primary numerator in participation-rate calculations and descriptive statistics about participants, including nativity breakdowns used in media and fact-checking [2] [6] [3] [7].
3. ERS policy and data products: harmonizing state rules and time series
The Economic Research Service curates the SNAP Policy Database and produced the SNAP Data System and related datasets that document state-level administrative choices and historical participation series; ERS data are designed to capture how state policy variation affects immigrant eligibility and participation, though some ERS products have faced reliability challenges and are no longer updated in full because of inconsistencies in source data [4] [8] [9].
4. State administrative data and quality-control reporting
State SNAP agencies submit administrative records — including Quality Control (QC) samples and the universe-level case data that FNS uses to construct fiscal-year reports — and these state files underpin FNS’s Characteristics reports and are integral to researchers’ estimates, but states’ reporting practices and legal agreements shape what is shared and how granular the federal data can be [3] [7].
5. Hybrid methodologies and third‑party analyses
Independent analyses and government technical reports routinely merge CPS ASEC with USDA administrative counts (and sometimes Mathematica’s modeling work) to estimate participation rates by immigrant status; Mathematica-style methods combine modeled eligibility from survey data with USDA administrative counts to produce participation estimates, and organizations such as the Migration Policy Institute use these hybrid approaches to analyze immigrant households, noting small but meaningful differences between immigrant and native participation rates [5] [10].
6. Known measurement problems, political context and privacy debates
Official documentation and expert panels warn that combining survey and administrative sources can produce implausible results for subgroups — even participation rates above 100 percent — because of misreporting, timing mismatches and imputation errors [1]; separately, recent federal efforts to centralize more applicant-level data from states — including immigration status — have sparked privacy and legal concerns about USDA’s expanded data requests and use of systems like SAVE, revealing an explicit policy agenda to “eliminate data silos” and heightening tensions between federal oversight and state privacy questions [11] [12].
7. What the data say about immigrants’ share of SNAP and reporting caveats
Multiple authoritative sources indicate that foreign-born participants make up a minority of SNAP caseloads and spending — fact-checks and USDA releases show most recipients are U.S.-born and that noncitizens constitute a small share of participants — but precise shares depend on definitions (foreign-born vs. noncitizen vs. unauthorized), the datasets fused, and whether analyses count mixed-status households or only individual recipients [13] [14] [10].