Thread: Immigrant Households Account for 35 percent of Child Poverty in Minnesota

Immigrant Households Account for 35 percent of Child Poverty in Minnesota

By Jason Richwine, Ph.D., January 6, 2021







One of the main critiques of post-1965 immigration to the U.S. is that it has worsened the problems of poverty, school dropout, and welfare dependency.

Importing immigrants who suffer from these problems adds to the social burden and makes helping impoverished Americans more difficult.

The burden added by immigration varies widely across the U.S., but there is perhaps no state where it is more noticeable than Minnesota. With a population that is about 8.6 percent foreign-born, Minnesota is not a high-immigration state relative to the U.S. as a whole. Nevertheless, the socioeconomic divide found there between immigrants and natives is so large that the state’s poverty-related problems still have a pronounced immigration component.

Table 1 compares the rates of poverty-related problems among immigrants and natives in Minnesota. The gaps are large. For example, 20.9 percent of working-age immigrants in Minnesota do not have a high school diploma, compared to just 5 percent of working-age natives. Furthermore, 40.1 percent of immigrant-headed households use Medicaid, compared to 17.9 percent of native-headed households.

Table 1: Rates of Poverty-Related Problems in Minnesota, by Immigrant Status
	Rate Among Natives	Rate Among Immigrants	Rate Among Immigrants With More Than 10 Years in U.S.
Adults Who Are in Poverty	8.3%	16.2%	13.7%
Children* Who Are in Poverty	9.4%	25.9%	21.2%
Working-Age Adults without a High School Diploma	5.0%	20.9%	23.5%
Households Receving Cash Welfare	5.6%	11.2%	11.7%
Households Receiving Food Stamps	6.5%	16.6%	16.3%
Households Receiving Medicaid	17.9%	40.1%	39.3%
Households that Are Overcrowded	1.2%	13.5%	11.4%
Source: 2018 American Community Survey. Household nativity and residency are determined by the household head. * Immigrant column includes all children in immigrant-headed households.

The last column of Table 1 shows that immigrants in Minnesota continue to struggle even after 10 years of U.S. residency. For example, the rate of adult poverty among long-term immigrants is still 13.7 percent. Meanwhile, welfare rates are essentially unchanged for long-term immigrants, and the percentage without a high school diploma is actually higher.

Because the native-immigrant divides shown in Table 1 are so pronounced, immigrants must cause a disproportionate share of the poverty-related problems in Minnesota. Table 2 demonstrates just how large that disproportion is.

Immigrant-headed households account for 16.4 percent of the state’s children overall, but they account for 35.2 percent of children who live in poverty.

Furthermore, only 11.5 percent of working-age adults in Minnesota are immigrants, but immigrants make up 35.5 percent of the state’s working-age adults who do not have a high school diploma.

Table 2: Immigrant Contribution to Poverty-Related Problems in Minnesota
Category	Problem	Immigrant Share of Category with Problem	Immigrant Share of Category Overall
Adults	Poverty	18.3%	10.3%
Children*	Poverty	35.2%	16.4%
Working-Age Adults	No high school diploma	35.5%	11.5%
Households	Receiving cash welfare	16.0%	8.7%
Households	Receiving food stamps	19.7%	8.7%
Households	Receiving Medicaid	17.6%	8.7%
Households	Overcrowded conditions	51.0%	8.7%
Source: 2018 American Community Survey. Household nativity and residency are determined by the household head. * Immigrant column includes all children in immigrant-headed households.

Health authorities have identified overcrowding as a major contributor to the spread of communicable diseases, including Covid-19.

About 51 percent of overcrowded households in Minnesota are headed by an immigrant, even though only 8.7 percent of the state’s total households are headed by an immigrant. Put another way, the problem of household overcrowding in Minnesota would be cut by more than half in the absence of immigration.

As noted above, the disproportionate impact of immigration is especially large in Minnesota compared to other parts of the U.S. One reason is that the state’s native-born residents are famously high-achievers, helping to motivate the late Pat Moynihan’s quip that “states wishing to improve their schools should move closer to Canada.” Another reason is that Minnesota has attracted several groups of predominantly low-skill immigrants, including Mexicans and refugees from the Horn of Africa. The resulting socioeconomic disparity is notable both for its sharpness and its persistence. It is a stark illustration of how low-skill immigration can create significant problems for developed societies.

Methodological Notes

The source for both tables is the 2018 American Community Survey.

Poverty refers to living below the official poverty line, which is a function of income and family structure.

An immigrant household is one in which the “head” (or reference person) is foreign-born. The head also determines the years of U.S. residency for the household-level analyses in the last column of Table 1. When measuring child poverty, “immigrant” children are all of the minors who live in an immigrant-headed household, regardless of whether the children are themselves foreign-born.

“Working age” refers to ages 18 to 64.

A household is overcrowded according to the Census Bureau if, roughly speaking, it has more people than rooms. See the CIS report on overcrowding for more details.



https://usinc.org/immigrant-househol...-in-minnesota/

We need a big study and graphs to come to this deduction? What did this cost the US taxpayers? LOL

These people overbreed in the dirt in poverty back home, they do the SAME thing here!

They are pregnant at 14, generations of welfare, food stamps, and now MORE ghettos we do not need!

Stuffing 20 people into one filthy household, pay no rent, pool their free government cheese money to send back home.

Shut down all immigration.

Many of them REFUSE to learn to speak or read English!

Then we pay over $15 GRAND per foreign "migrant" for their school and free breakfast, lunch, and dinner for 12 years!!!!

Get on birth control. Cut off these programs and the free stuff.

Disgusting!

Protesters in Minneapolis raise SOMALI flag after police kill suspected felon



5 Jan, 2021 01:50 / Updated 3 days ago

© Stephen Maturen / Getty Images via AFP





Black Lives Matter and Muslim organizations led a protest in Minneapolis, Minnesota against the police shooting of a suspected gun felon who shot first.

The protesters hoisted a Somali flag over a building at one point.

Hundreds of protesters marched in the city on Sunday, in a demonstration organized by ‘Black Lives Matter’ activists and Muslim organizations. They were protesting over the killing of Dolal Idd, 23, the son of a Somali immigrant.

As Muslim community leaders addressed the crowd in Somali, some protesters raised a Somalian flag over a gas station, allegedly after taking down an American flag.


<font color="#000000"><span style="font-family: Archivo">https://twitter.com/i/status/1345915908670238721

The gesture incensed conservatives. “What complete utter disrespect,” one commenter wrote. “Imagine raising an American flag in Somalia... you’d be tortured and killed.


People who don’t value American culture and laws need to go back.”

Idd was shot dead by Minneapolis police last Wednesday. Body camera footage of the fatal shooting released on Thursday showed Idd firing at police after they stopped his car in what they called a “probable cause” weapons investigation. He was killed when officers returned fire.


the video footage showed Idd firing first, one Muslim activist told the Minneapolis Star Tribune that he believed the footage to be edited and “inconclusive.”

There may be as many as 250,000 Somalis in the Twin Cities, having been settled there by US charities as refugees after clan wars plunged Somalia into anarchy in the early 1990s. Minneapolis is actually represented in the US House by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota), first elected in 2018.

Six Minneapolis PD officers are currently awaiting trial over the death of George Floyd, an African-American man, during a botched arrest at the end of May. Cell phone video showed Floyd complaining he couldn’t breathe as an officer was kneeling on his neck. Protests over Floyd’s death quickly turned into violent riots in Minneapolis and neighboring St. Paul, before spreading to nearly every major US city during the summer.



https://www.rt.com/usa/511534-minnea...-flag-protest/