Poverty, race and Hispanic immigration
Robert J. Samuelson:
The government's poverty rate, released just as Katrina struck, was 12.7 percent in 2004. That's the proportion of people living beneath the official poverty line, about $19,300 for a family of four. The current poverty rate is up from its recent low (11.3 percent in 2000) and similar to many earlier years (13 percent in 1980 and 12.6 percent in 1970).
But the overall poverty rate is misleading. True, poverty has been stuck for non-Hispanic whites, though it's fairly low. Since the late 1970s, it's generally fluctuated between 8 percent and 9 percent, depending on the economy. But poverty among blacks -- though still appallingly high -- has declined sharply. In 2004 it was 24.7 percent, down from 33.1 percent in 1993, though up from 22.5 percent in 2000. As recently as 1983, it was 35.7 percent.
The dramatic improvement may reflect the 1990s' economic boom. Or it could stem from the 1996 welfare reform, which restricted benefits and imposed tougher work requirements. Job-holding among single mothers has increased significantly. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution reports that the share of never-married mothers working rose from 46 percent to 66 percent from 1994 to 2002. The number of families receiving traditional welfare dropped from 5 million in 1994 to 2 million in 2003.
Given these trends, the overall poverty rate should be drifting down. It isn't. The main reason, as I've written before, is immigration. We have uncontrolled entry of poor, unskilled workers across our southern border. Although many succeed, many don't, and many poor Latino immigrants have children, who are also poor. In 2004, 25 percent of the poverty population was Hispanic, up from 12 percent in 1980. Over this period, Hispanics represented almost three-quarters of the increase in the poverty population.
Immigrants' Growing Role in U.S. Poverty Cited
Immigration Moments That Changed A California Budget Analyst’s Mind
The Changing Face of Poverty
posted by Adam Lawson @ 11:19 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
An impoverished underclass (predominantly) ethnically different (earlier Black, and now increasingly Hispanic) from the majority population (still White for now) is almost the very definition of social pathology. This was in part the impetus behind the whole '60s 'War on Poverty'. Any social problem, e.g. school outcomes, is exacerbated by (often extreme) variation across ethnic groups, especially so in the US (with its slave history) where Whites are seens as (unfairly) advantaged', and non-whites unfairly disadvantaged.
And after the 'civil rights' national soul-searching about all of that, here we are importing it all over again.
Crazy.
I doubt the 'browning of America' -- check the census projections -- will help.
I doubt the 'browning of America' -- check the census projections -- will help
Well, it will give liberals an opportunity to whine about "racism" when many of these "new Americans" end up in poverty and living off of the American taxpayer.
The previous problem of poverty as it affected American blacks was at least a limited phenomenon in that the number of persons affected was relatively small. The descendants of African slaves couldn't redefine their parameters. You either descended from slaves or you didn't. You might have a higher number of offspring than average but even that has been leveling off for some time.
The "browning" of America is a totally different thing. It includes not only offspring born here but all of the millions of immigrants that come here legally and illegally. The well of this surplus of humanity is almost endless.
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