The Link Between Non-Choosy Immigration Policies And Child Poverty
Kay Hymowitz writes at City Journal about child poverty -- and why we in the U.S. can't be welcoming to immigrants (meaning without being choosy about which we take in) and keep child poverty rates low:
Sweden presents the most interesting case, since it has been the most welcoming of the Nordic countries--and it has one of the most generous welfare states, providing numerous benefits for its immigrants. For a long time, the large majority of Sweden's immigrants were from Finland, a country with a similar culture and economy. By the 1990s, the immigrant population began to change, though, as refugees arrived from the former Yugoslavia, Iran, and Iraq--populations with little in common culturally with Sweden and far more likely to be unskilled than immigrants from the European Union. By 2011, Sweden, like other European countries, was seeing an explosion in the number of asylum applicants from Syria, Afghanistan, and Africa; in 2015 and 2016, there was another spike. Sweden's percentage of foreign-born has swelled to 17 percent--higher than the approximately 13 percent in the United States.How has Sweden handled its growing diversity? We don't have much reliable data from the most recent surge, but numbers from earlier this decade suggest the limits of relying on copious state benefits to acclimate cultural outsiders. In the U.S., immigrants are still more likely to be employed than are the native-born. In Sweden, the opposite holds. More than 26 percent of Swedish newcomers have remained unemployed long-term (for more than a year). Immigrants tend to be poorer than natives and more likely to fall back into poverty if they do surmount it. In fact, Sweden has one of the highest poverty rates among immigrants relative to native-born in the European Union. Most strikingly, a majority of children living in Sweden classified as poor in 2010 were immigrants.
Despite its resolute antipoverty efforts, Sweden has, if anything, been less successful than the U.S. at bringing its second-generation immigrants up to speed. According to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey, Sweden has "declined over the past decade [between 2005 and 2015] from around average to significantly below average . . . . No other country taking part in PISA has seen a steeper fall." The Swedish Education Agency reports that immigrant kids were responsible for 85 percent of a decline in school performance.
Outcomes like these suggest that immigration optimists have underestimated the difficulty of integrating the less-educated from undeveloped countries, and their children, into advanced economies. A more honest accounting raises tough questions. Should the United States, as the Trump administration is proposing, and as is already the case in Canada and Australia, pursue a policy favoring higher-skilled immigration? Or do we accept higher levels of child poverty and lower social mobility as a cost of giving refuge and opportunity to people with none? If we accept such costs, does it even make sense to compare our child-poverty numbers with those of countries like Denmark or Sweden, which have only recently begun to take in large numbers of low-skilled immigrants?
And the upshot:
In short, confronting honestly the question of child-poverty rates in the United States--and, increasingly, such rates in other advanced countries--means acknowledging the reality that a newcomer's background plays a vital role in immigrant success.
Leaving aside immigration, it seems to me that in the U.S., at any rate, we can't complain about low birth rates and refuse to help those poor kids who were BORN here. What a waste of potentially good taxpayers.
lenona at November 20, 2017 6:49 AM
and refuse to help those poor kids who were BORN here
Refuse to help? should I list the alphabet soup of public assistance aimed at the poor children?
It isn't like we're putting them in work houses, tho one could make the argument that putting them into public schools is a form of child abuse.
I R A Darth Aggie at November 20, 2017 8:32 AM
So why do homeless families with small kids still exist?
lenona at November 20, 2017 11:16 AM
Can God make a rock so big that even He can't lift it?
Discuss.
Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at November 20, 2017 12:09 PM
I read that in Germany refugee immigrants are not allowed to work for I think 9 months. The recent surge has seen immigrants who self-isolate, don't learn German, don't want to be German and tend to stay unemployed for a long time. If you want crime, have a population of unemployed young men.
cc at November 20, 2017 3:07 PM
Most likely answer Lenona, drugs. Why do little children starve in the US? Almost universally it is parents with a drug addiction.
What programs do you propose we enact to make sure families with little kids don't become homeless? Or go hungry? Or be sexually abused?
Ben at November 20, 2017 8:03 PM
"So why do homeless families with small kids still exist?"
Because people would rather have sex than work, plan or think?
I can show you a couple living in a secondhand, crappy trailer with their two kids who have decided to have a third because they won $5K on a lottery ticket, and they have food stamps.
When you see small kids in poverty, you are seeing Darwinian selection at work. It is no less real for our distaste at seeing it work on our own species.
Radwaste at November 21, 2017 5:42 AM
All I'm saying is, homelessness, especially for children, didn't USED to be as common between WWII and 1980 - and after that, it wasn't just winos. Middle-class people can be victims of fires and hurricanes too, for starters.
Also, re the case of Gregory Kingsley/Shawn Russ, the 11-year-old in Florida who "divorced" his mother in 1992 (yes, she used drugs), Newsweek said:
http://www.newsweek.com/irreconcilable-differences-198422
...Rachel saw her kids regularly over the next 11 months. Eventually, she found an apartment and a roommate, and convinced the state she was ready to take care of her boys. But the roommate didn't last. Two months after the kids moved in, Rachel once again fell behind on the rent and had to give up the apartment. When the boys had returned from foster care, says Rachel, "I promised them they'd never have to leave again-and I meant it. But here I was all over again. It made me so angry that the state was willing to pay a stranger $1,200 to care for my children, when if they could have just helped me a little, I could have kept my children. I was on my hands and knees to them, 'What do I do?"'...
...If Rachel had received financial support at critical moments, her family might never have broken up. But her story is far from unusual. Florida is in the top third of states in per capita income; but because it has no state income tax, it's at the very bottom in social spending on children. There are currently 11,300 wards of the state; child advocates say that two thirds of them have been in foster care longer than the 18 months permitted by law....
(snip)
OK
lenona at November 22, 2017 6:49 PM
I got cut off.
I said:
OK, so I don't know how much things have changed since then for poor kids - if at all.
lenona at November 22, 2017 6:51 PM
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