Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality

Chapter 1. Introduction

/ 1 Chapter 1 Introduction David Card and Steven Raphael T he rapid rise in the proportion of foreign-born residents in the United States since the mid-1960s is one of the most important demographic events of the past fifty years. As a consequence of this immigrant surge the country has become more diverse linguistically, culturally, socioeconomically, and perhaps politically. The increasing relative size of the immigrant population raises many key questions for understanding trends in U.S. poverty rates and inequality. To begin, immigration has altered the demographic composition of the nation, increasing the proportion foreign-born, the proportion of the resident population with extremely low levels of education, as well as the proportion with relatively high levels of educational attainment. These compositional effects alone have likely impacted overall U.S. poverty rates. Second, immigrants supply new skills and compete for jobs in the U.S. labor market. The additional workers brought to the United States via immigration may impact the wages and employment levels of the native born, and in turn the likelihood that natives experience poverty through multiple channels. For natives most similar to immigrants in terms of their labor market skills, competition with immigrants may suppress wages and employment and increase poverty. Alternatively , natives whose skills are sufficiently different from those of immigrants may find their wages and employment rates enhanced by the presence of immigrants with skills that complement their own in the workplace. Immigrants may also bring investment capital to the United States either directly through personal savings and investment or indirectly through their very presence attracting international capital flows, a factor that would improve employment prospects and diminish poverty generally in the United States. Third, new immigration flows may impact poverty rates among previous immigrants . Newly arrived immigrants and immigrants with some tenure in the United States are perhaps most likely to be in direct competition with one another in the U.S. labor market. Moreover, immigrant communities tend to geographically cluster in enclaves. To the extent that such geographic clustering provides Immigration, Poverty, and Socioeconomic Inequality 2 / ready social networks rich with information on negotiating U.S. institutions and finding work, the existence of enclaves may increase employment and reduce poverty among newer immigrants. On the other hand, such geographic clusters may inhibit English-language acquisition and perhaps make immigrants less willing to migrate internally for jobs in cities and states with smaller co-national populations. Finally, over time immigration has and will continue to alter the demographic composition of the native born population, raising the fractions of people with Hispanic and Asian origin. The effects of these changes on overall poverty rates depend critically on the extent to which the children of immigrants climb the socioeconomic ladder. In general, the children of immigrants, especially immigrants from countries with low levels of educational attainment, tend to achieve educational attainment levels that greatly exceed those of their parents. Moreover, English -language acquisition in the 1.5 and second generation is nearly universal. However, there are important differences across national-origin groups in outcomes among the 1.5 and second generations, some of which may be culturally determined and others driven by specific policies that impact select groups within the United States. This discussion highlights the complexities and subtleties of the relationship between recent U.S. immigration trends and the nation’s poverty rate. In addition to the mediating role of economic forces operating through the channels of labor market competition and overall economic growth, the extent to which recent immigration trends enhance or diminish the nation’s poverty rate depends on immigrant cultural practices brought to the United States, the cultural development of immigrant communities within the United States, as well as specific assimilation trajectories experienced by immigrants in different national-origin communities . Moreover, all of these avenues may be exacerbated or assuaged by policy governing antipoverty programs, education, the civil rights of the unauthorized, and immigration flows more generally. The chapters in this volume are devoted to studying these various economic, social, and policy factors that may link immigration to poverty among immigrants themselves and among the native born. The contributors to this volume represent a multidisciplinary research team assembled with the specific aim of employing complementary methodological approaches to flesh out the relationship between immigration and poverty in the United States. In this volume, our authors employ microeconomic theoretical and empirical analysis, detailed demographic analysis of census data, ethnographic methods, historical policy analysis, as well as detailed investigations of the consequence...