Is there any resource within IPUMS that shows the absolute number of immigrants by PUMA and/or MSA?
Using the Census 2000 5% or ACS, I could find the proportion of a PUMA’s population with a foreign place of birth (assuming I use person-level weights when performing this calculation). But just wanted to find out if the total numbers were available here or if I need to use the Census summary files.
IPUMS primarily focuses on providing microdata. The data are representative of the actual population and can be used to produce estimates of actual population figures, but official counts are not currently available as part of the IPUMS samples. However, the NHGIS project, which, like IPUMS, is housed in the Minnesota Population Center, offers many of the Census summary tables going back to 1790 at many different geographic levels. While NHGIS is primarily focused on mapping data, the summary tables can be extracted independent of shape files as .csv files with optional descriptive headers.
I hope this helps.
You can try to get this variable on the US Census FactFinder (http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/n…). A lot of ACS variables can be tabulated via FactFinder. Whether you want to use IPUMS microdata + stat package (Stata, SAS, etc) or FactFinder tables (downloadable as Excel) depends on how familiar you are with the packages, how familiar you are with Excel, and how well you can customize the ouput of one or the other for your needs.
Stas