Importing Poverty
By Robert J. Samuelson
Wednesday, September 5, 2007; Page A21
The government last week released its annual statistical report on poverty and household income. As usual, we -- meaning the public, the media and politicians -- missed a big part of the story. It is this: The stubborn persistence of poverty, at least as measured by the government, is increasingly a problem associated with immigration. As more poor Hispanics enter the country, poverty goes up. This is not complicated, but it is widely ignored.
The standard story is that poverty is stuck; superficially, the statistics support that. The poverty rate measures the share of Americans below the official poverty line, which in 2006 was $20,614 for a four-person household. Last year, the poverty rate was 12.3 percent, down slightly from 12.6 percent in 2005 but higher than the recent low, 11.3 percent in 2000. It was also higher than the 11.8 percent average for the 1970s. So the conventional wisdom seems amply corroborated.
t isn't. Look again at the numbers. In 2006, there were 36.5 million people in poverty. That's the figure that translates into the 12.3 percent poverty rate. In 1990, the population was smaller, and there were 33.6 million people in poverty, a rate of 13.5 percent. The increase from 1990 to 2006 was 2.9 million people (36.5 million minus 33.6 million). Hispanics accounted for all of the gain.
Consider: From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased 3.2 million, from 6 million to 9.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty fell from 16.6 million (poverty rate: 8.8 percent) in 1990 to 16 million (8.2 percent) in 2006. Among blacks, there was a decline from 9.8 million in 1990 (poverty rate: 31.9 percent) to 9 million (24.3 percent) in 2006. White and black poverty has risen somewhat since 2000 but is down over longer periods.
Only an act of willful denial can separate immigration and poverty. The increase among Hispanics must be concentrated among immigrants, legal and illegal, as well as their American-born children. Yet, this story goes largely untold. Government officials didn't say much about immigration when briefing on the poverty and income reports. The American Enterprise Institute, a conservative-leaning think tank, and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal advocacy group for the poor, both held briefings. Immigration was a common no-show.
Why is it important to get this story straight?
One reason is truthfulness. It's usually held that we've made little, if any, progress against poverty. That's simply untrue. Among non-Hispanic whites, the poverty rate may be approaching some irreducible minimum: people whose personal habits, poor skills, family relations or bad luck condemn them to a marginal existence. Among blacks, the poverty rate remains abysmally high, but it has dropped sharply since the 1980s. Moreover, taking into account federal benefits (food stamps, the earned-income tax credit) that aren't counted as cash income would further reduce reported poverty.
We shouldn't think that our massive efforts to mitigate poverty have had no effect. Immigration hides our grudging progress...
washingtonpost.com
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My response - I agree that the poverty rate is higher because of immigration. I think Samuelson shows that very well.
OTOH its not that we are getting increased overall poverty because of immigration. The rate of poverty (esp. if measured in an absolute rather than a relative sense) among non immigrants has declined. Also the rate of poverty among immigrants has declined (a larger percentage of them where poor before they immigrated). So how do we get a slightly large poverty rate? By immigrants, and there direct next generation descendants being a larger percentage of the population. If the group with a larger poverty rate increases as a percentage of the population that poverty rates can go up even if the rate is declining for every group, and if the majority of individuals are doing better. Immigration isn't on the net making people poor, or keeping them in poverty (in fact it helps raise many of the immigrants from poverty, or at least to raise them to a higher level that we might still consider poor), but its brining in new poor people. Its not totally unreasonable to assert that there is something negative about brining in new poor people, OTOH its likely not to be a random selection of the poor but rather be shifted towards people with higher than average initiative (if your lazier than average you probably won't emigrate, unless perhaps you'll starve if you don't or someone sets up some cushy setup for you after you immigrate, but that doesn't apply to most immigrants. The main counter argument to that point is that people could immigrate for government benefits. That's why I'm much more partial to arguments about not making illegal immigrants eligible for welfare than I am to thoughts about trying to stop illegal immigration (which I don't think can be done) or mass deportation.
Another possible negative is that emigration from Mexico reduces the incentive for government reform, and reduction in the level of socialism in Mexico (both by removing the discontented people, and by the remittances which go back to Mexico and might make some people who stay more content), and also might represent a drain of more intelligent or motivated individuals from Mexico, and thus will help keep Mexico poor. |
