The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether and how much children in immigrant families contribute to fluctuations in the national child poverty rate The immigrant population has shown especially rapid growth over recent decades, and children in immigrant families increased accounted for 77 percent of the total increase in children during this time. Because of the growing size of immigrant families and the high incidence of poverty among their children, some have argued that immigrants are the cause of the high poverty rate among U.S. children, particularly immigrants with low skills and education levels.

Methods

This study utilizes the Annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey (CPS). Three years—1994, 2002, and 2011—were chosen to investigate the recent fluctuations in the child poverty rate. A total of 260,205 children from native, naturalized citizen, and noncitizen families were chosen for the sample of this study. To examine the contribution of population-composition changes, especially in regard to the effects of the share of immigrant children on the changes in the child poverty rate, this study used the nonlinear decomposition technique.

Results

The findings of this study, overall, indicate that although the increase in the number of children in immigrant families has placed upward pressure on the child poverty rate, its contributions to the decline of the rate between 1993 and 2001 and to its increase between 2001 and 2010 were fairly negligible. The findings of the analyses undoubtedly showed that the strength of the economy and parental employment status accounted for most of the decline in the child poverty rate from 1993 to 2001 and most of the increase from 2001 to 2010. Compared to the contributions of the economic factors, the increase of children in immigrant families appeared to play a very minor role.

Implications

Some argue that the large and rapidly growing number of children in noncitizen families (including those who are undocumented) drive up the national child poverty rate to inordinately high levels. The present analyses, however, showed that the growth of children in noncitizen families contributed to fluctuations in the child poverty rate only slightly.