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Chapter 5. “New Destinations” and Immigrant Poverty
- Russell Sage Foundation
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/ 135 Chapter 5 “New Destinations” and Immigrant Poverty mark Ellis, Richard wright, and matthew Townley T he 1990s and 2000s saw the spatial diversification of immigration to new destination states away from the Southwest, West, and Northeast to the Plains, the South, and East. Some states recorded a doubling and tripling of populations; some counties grew at even higher rates (for example, Li 2009; Massey 2008; Light 2006; Zúñiga and Hernández-León 2006). Dispersion to suburbs and rural areas was an allied dimension of these new immigrant geographies (Singer et al. 2008; Jones 2008). Martha Crowley and her colleagues (2006) report that immigrants, including Mexicans, who lived in these new destination areas in 2000 had lower rates of poverty than immigrants in traditional gateway regions.1 This could be because the economies of new destinations were more vibrant than traditional gateways; immigrants who lived in new destinations had characteristics that enabled them to escape poverty more readily; or a combination of these two factors. Crowley and colleagues’ analysis suggests that new destination economies rather than immigrant characteristics are the cause of this new destination advantage. Thus, relocation to new destinations in the 1990s likely had a poverty-reducing effect for immigrants . In this chapter, we investigate what happened to the geography of immigrant poverty in the 2000s. One possibility is that the differences between traditional gateway and new destination immigrant poverty rates remained as they were in 2000. Alternatively, the new destination advantage could have grown, perhaps because immigrants in new destination economies weathered the 2007 to 2009 economic recession better than immigrants in traditional gateways. Or perhaps the slow economic growth of the early 2000s and the subsequent recession reduced or reversed the new destination advantage and compressed the variation in immigrant poverty rates across space. Whatever the geographical changes were in the 2000s, they unfolded against a backdrop of diverging trends in immigrant versus native poverty rates. In the 2007 Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality 136 / to 2009 period, the national immigrant poverty rate stood at 16.4 percent, a 1.5 percentage point decline since 2000. The national native-born poverty rate rose by 1.5 percentage points to 13.3 percent over the same period.2 Thus, although the poverty rate remained higher for immigrants than the U.S. born, their rates began to converge in the 2000s. In raw numbers, the percentages correspond to 6,164,679 immigrants in poverty in 2007 to 2009, an increase of 10.9 percent from 2000; and 34,280,367 native-born persons in poverty, an increase of 16.5 percent. So, while the deteriorating economy pushed more people into poverty, immigrants appear to have weathered the storm better than the U.S. born, especially when one factors in the faster growth of the foreign-born population during the 2000s—something we do explicitly later in the chapter. Other chapters in this volume discuss explanations for these differential national trends in immigrant and U.S.-born poverty, such as the changing nationalorigin composition of the immigrant population (chapter 1), changing skills of immigrant arrivals (chapter 2), and changes in immigrant household composition, possibly in response to welfare reform (chapter 11). In this chapter, we turn our attention to changes in the geography of immigrant and U.S.-born poverty in the 2000s, paying particular attention to the evolution of new destination versus traditional gateway differences as distinct from a more general analysis of state and metropolitan area trends (compare chapter 2). Three interlinked questions drive the analysis: Does the pattern of lower poverty rates in new destinations in the 1990s persist into the 2000s? Why do immigrant poverty rates vary geographically? Specifically, does this variation stem mostly from local area economy effects or from geographical variations in immigrant characteristics, such as education, that affect the likelihood of being poor? Between 2000 and the most recent period for which we have data, how have local area economy effects and the spatial variation in immigrant characteristics changed the geography of immigrant poverty? baCkgRouND As discussed in chapter 1, immigrants are more likely to be poor than the U.S. born. For example, in 2000, 17.9 percent of foreign-born persons lived below the federal poverty line versus 11.8 percent of U.S.-born persons. The higher poverty rate for immigrants derives mainly from their disadvantageous sociodemographic characteristics (human capital) and the types of jobs they hold. A simple comparison with the U.S. born on mean...