Immigration, poverty linked

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The topic of poverty in the United States has become intertwined with one of the most hotly debated issues on Capitol Hill and across the nation -- immigration.

No longer does the word "immigrants" conjure up images of boats docking at Ellis Island full of Europeans looking for a bright future. They have been replaced by visions of men and women risking their lives to illegally cross the nation's southern border to begin a new life under the radar of authorities and often in the most impoverished situations.

"Any discussion of poverty in the United States would have to deal with immigration ... it doesn't make sense to import poverty," which is what is happening now, said Steven A. Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates stricter immigration limits and enforcement.

George Borjas, professor of economics and social policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, agrees that immigration and poverty are linked, and he cites the same reasons as CIS.

"They are linked because an increasing number of poor in this country are foreign-born, and a disproportionately large number of immigrants are high school dropouts," Mr. Borjas said.

The Harvard scholar, whose family emigrated to this country from Cuba when he was a child, said a significant element in this equation is that at least one-third of immigrants are from Mexico.

"Mexicans tend to be at a very low level of schooling," Mr. Borjas said. "A very large proportion have less than eight years of education, and many have only three or four years. Quite a few actually have zero."

So "immigration can have a large impact on the labor market," he said, adding: "The wages of high school dropouts have fallen between 5 [percent] to 8 percent in the past 20 years."

A recent report released by the Pew Hispanic Research Center showed that Hispanics, who constitute more than half of immigrants entering the U.S. today, accounted for a 68 percent share in the growth of the nation's "poverty population" between 1990 and 2000.

In the first four years of the 21st century, the combination of immigration and births to immigrants accounted for more than 80 percent of the U.S. population growth, according to CIS data.