National Data, By Edwin S. Rubenstein
Immigration Killed The War On Poverty
The poverty rate is down slightly, to 12.3%. Phooey.
Vdare

For more than two decades following the end of World War II, rising incomes and declining poverty rates characterized the American economy. In 1947 nearly one-third (32 percent) of all families were officially classified as poor. [Have Antipoverty Programs Increased Poverty? James Gwartney and Thomas S. MeCaleb, The Cato Journal, Spring-Summer 1985 (PDF)] By 1959 only one-fifth (22.4 percent) were poor. By 1973, the fraction of Americans living in poverty had dropped to just over a tenth, to 11.1 percent.

Then everything came to a screeching halt. The poverty rate rose to the 15 percent range in the eighties and early nineties. The Clinton boom pushed poverty down 11.3 percent in 2000, but it has since rebounded.

Basically, the poverty rate has been oscillating in the 11-15 percent range for more than thirty years. It has never bettered the low set in 1973—34 years ago.



Incredible as it may seem, progress against poverty came to a grinding halt in the late 1960s exactly as federal transfers were expanding at a record pace. Most of the postwar decline in poverty occurred before Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society reached full throttle.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. LBJ’s War On Poverty programs proved to be an irresistible draw to millions of impoverished foreign born—who could enter legally after the floodgates were opened by the 1965 Immigration Act.

The quality of immigrants deteriorated dramatically after that legislation was signed into law. In 1960, for example, new immigrants were generally better educated, earned more, and were less likely to be poor than natives. But by the end of the 20th century, new arrivals had two fewer years of education and earned one-third less than natives. [See The Top Ten Symptoms of Immigration, by George J. Borjas, CIS, November 1999]

Data for 2006 show that the poverty rate for recent (non-citizen) arrivals is nearly twice that of natives: [Source: Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2006, August 2007. Table 6. PDF]

--- Native born: 11.9 percent are poor

--- Foreign born (all): 15.2 percent

--- Foreign born (non-citizens): 19.0 percent


Immigrants, legal and illegal, accounted for 12.6 percent America’s population, but 15.6 percent of the its poor in 2006. Of course, we should also include their native-born “anchor babiesâ€