Only those with very low incomes indeed are officially classified as “poor.” For a family of four in 1997, the annual income poverty level was $16,400. Even with a threshold this low, a disturbing share of native households are poor (11.8%); but the share of poor immigrant households is much higher (20.4%). Thus, the share of people living in poverty in immigrant households is about 73 percent higher than in native households.
This gap between the poverty share in native and immigrant households has been widening. Since 1979, the native poverty rate has been a fairly constant 12 percent. But among immigrant households, the poverty rate was 15.5 percent in 1979, rose to 18.8 percent in 1989, and then to 21.8 percent in 1997 before dropping back to 20.4 percent in the 1998 data released in 1999, during this period of record low unemployment.
As a result of this poverty gap, immigrants make up an unusually large share of the poor population. In 1997, one out of every eleven people was an immigrant, but more than one in five poor people resided in an immigrant household. In fact, as the immigrant population grows, immigrants account for more and more of the growth in the poor population. The growth in immigration-related poverty accounted for the lion’s share (75%) of the total increase in the poor population between 1989 and 1997.
The rise in immigrant poverty antedates immigration reform. The rise in immigrant poverty is not due to welfare reform (statistics show it occurring before the welfare reform law took effect, and the recent drop has come under the new rules). The rise in immigrant poverty may not be dismissed as a result of out-of-control illegal immigration. The illegal alien population comprises only 22.5 percent of persons in immigrant households living in poverty in 1997.
The rise in immigrant poverty is due rather to factors intrinsic to the immigration flow that was set in motion by our current immigration policy. This may be seen from the fact that the rate of poverty was lower among immigrants who came earlier. In 1979, households of recent (within the previous ten years) immigrants had a poverty rate of 23 percent. By 1997, the share of recent immigrant households in poverty had risen to 29.2 percent. Not only are more new immigrants in poverty, but they are staying there longer, because the rate at which immigrants pull themselves out of poverty has slowed. Of the immigrants who arrived in the 1980s, there was only a slightly smaller share living in poverty in 1997 than there was in 1989.
The problem of immigrant poverty is even worse when the focus shifts to child poverty, because one of every five children in America lives in an immigrant household. In fact, almost all (96%) of the increase in the child population in the 1990s was due to children in immigrant households. As a result, the poverty rate for these children rose from 24.8 percent in 1990 to 30.9 percent in 1997. The increasing poverty rate among immigrant children and their preponderance in the child population has led to an overall increase in child poverty. The rate of young children in poverty rose from one in five in 1979 to one in four in 1996, so that in the strongest economy in the world, there are six million young children living in poverty.
The situation is even more severe in the high-immigration states; California, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas all have between 20 to 40 percent of the children living in immigrant households. Just three of those states (California, New York, and Texas), were responsible for one half of the increase in child poverty in the 1990s.
Even though our country arguably could do a better job of helping the poor -- native or immigrant -- pull themselves out of poverty, the ‘war against poverty’ has been made unwinable by an immigration policy that imports poverty en masse. Our current policy condemns us to be perpetually bailing out a badly leaking boat. Instead, we should repair it. Immigration law should be changed to eliminate preferences for extended family members and emphasize education and skills so that there is a better fit between the skills of immigrants and the nation’s needs.
Sources: Donald J. Hernandez, Children of Immigrants; One Fifth of America’s Children and Growing; Housing and Household Economic Statistics Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1999; Neil Bennett, Young Child Poverty in the States, National Center for Children in Poverty, 1998; Steve Camarota, Importing Poverty, Center for Immigration Studies, 1999.
FAIR, 10/99.
