At City Journal Kay S. Hymowitz explains why problems of poverty among children as so persistent in the United States:
Articles about America’s high levels of child poverty are a media evergreen. Here’s a typical entry, courtesy of the New York Times’s Eduardo Porter: “The percentage of children who are poor is more than three times as high in the United States as it is in Norway or the Netherlands. America has a larger proportion of poor children than Russia.†That’s right: Russia.
Outrageous as they seem, the assertions are true—at least in the sense that they line up with official statistics from government agencies and reputable nongovernmental organizations like the OECD and UNICEF. International comparisons of the sort that Porter makes, though, should be accompanied by a forest of asterisks. Data limitations, varying definitions of poverty, and other wonky problems are rampant in these discussions.
The lousy child-poverty numbers should come with another qualifying asterisk, pointing to a very American reality. Before Europe’s recent migration crisis, the United States was the only developed country consistently to import millions of very poor, low-skilled families, from some of the most destitute places on earth—especially from undeveloped areas of Latin America—into its communities, schools, and hospitals. Let’s just say that Russia doesn’t care to do this—and, until recently, Norway and the Netherlands didn’t, either. Both policymakers and pundits prefer silence on the relationship between America’s immigration system and poverty, and it’s easy to see why. The subject pushes us headlong into the sort of wrenching trade-offs that politicians and advocates prefer to avoid. Here’s the problem in a nutshell: you can allow mass low-skilled immigration, which many on the left and the right—and probably most poverty mavens—consider humane and quintessentially American. But if you do, pursuing the equally humane goal of substantially reducing child poverty becomes a lot harder.
You’d think this would be obvious but it’s amazing how many obvious things need explanation these days. A quarter of poor children are immigrants or the children of immigrants. If you have a way of ameliorating that while continuing to import a large population of people without skills that pay good wages or command of English, I’m all ears.
If we have three times the rate of childhood poverty, and one quarter are children of immigrants…
3 x (3/4) = 9/4 = 2ish (the three and the three quarters are rough numbers, so rough math)
Ok, removing the immigrants means we only have twice the problem. Immigration isn’t the major cause.
You cannot conclude that using your analytic approach. All you conclude is that it isn’t the only problem. I agree with that.
I think it is far more likely that the causes of childhood poverty among native born (poor wages, unemployment) is also affecting the immigrant community, than that they are entirely independent.
Alternately, the children of immigrants are also likely to be poor whether we took them in or not. The only question is where they are going to be poor.
(But, we could really game our numbers by deporting poor children — foreign and native born.)
I don’t advocate either one of those things. If your concern is for children in other countries, the best way of dealing with their poverty is in reform in those countries.
I would say “increase foreign aid” but our track record in that area is awful. The wisecrack that foreign aid consists of poor people in rich countries giving money to rich people in poor countries has a pathetic kernel of truth. Plus a lot of our foreign aid is actually composed of backdoor subsidies to U. S. companies. Probably the single thing we could do to help poor Africans most is to end our cotton subsidies.
My experience is with the poorest county in Nebraska, Thurston county. Indian country, Omaha country. I married into that tribe 42 years ago so I would say my experience should not be discounted. What I would say is that I never saw an Indian child hungry, except that growing kids are always hungry. They always have plenty to eat, and often eat out at fast food places. So, I question the data, and the motives of those who give misleading data.
How about some data?
It’s from 2009 but this provides a useful but incomplete snapshot:
http://www.nccp.org/publications/pdf/text_907.pdf
See starting page 40:
In 2008 there were ~7.7 million poor children who had parents that weren’t native-born Americans. There were 21 million poor children with native-born parents.
Here’s how they define things: