Credit: Spencer Platt / Staff
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America has a higher proportion of children in poverty than Russia. That’s a shocking statistic, but what it does it actually mean?
For a start, it doesn’t mean that American children are poorer than Russian children. These are relative poverty statistics, in which a poverty line is set at a given percentage of the average household national income in each nation. Because the average income in the US is significantly higher than in Russia, there are millions of Americans in poverty who are richer than millions of Russians not in poverty.
In a piece for City Journal, Kay S Hymowitz points to another problem with comparing poverty rates between countries – immigration. Different countries have different immigration patterns, taking in different numbers of immigrants from different countries of origin.
If you take millions of migrants from undeveloped parts of the world, where people are unlikely to have access to adequate levels of education and training, then that will have an impact on poverty figures in the country of destination:
“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.”
The irony is that in moving from a poor country to a rich one, the migrants have greatly improved their lot.
The overall effect is certainly paradoxical, but how significant is it?
“How does immigration affect those post-1964 American child-poverty figures? Until 1980, it didn’t… The relatively small number of immigrants settling in the U.S. tended to be from affluent nations and had commensurate skills. According to the Migration Policy Institute, in 1970, immigrant children were less likely to be poor than were the children of native-born Americans.
“By 1980, chiefly because of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act, the situation had reversed: immigrant kids were now poorer than native-born ones… As of 1990, immigrant kids had poverty rates 50 percent higher than their native counterparts.”
Progressives are famously fond of the ‘Scandinavian model’ – pointing to low levels of poverty in countries like Sweden. What they were less likely to point out is that, until quite recently, immigration levels – especially from non-European countries – were also low.
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