![]() ![]() They are doing remarkably well now, and we believe that their counterparts today have this potential, as well. The children in our data from countries like Mexico and El Salvador are those whose parents benefited from an earlier legalization effort in the mid-1980s. and thus are granted citizenship at birth. Indeed, this number is small because many children of undocumented immigrants are born in the U.S. Fortunately, this group is relatively small even in recent years: only 1.5 million (or five percent) of the 32 million children of immigrant parents are undocumented today. One question that arises with our work is: what about children who arrive without papers? Undocumented children face more barriers to mobility than other children of immigrants. And it most often takes them only one generation to rise up from poverty. The children of immigrants do typically make it in America. But our data sleuthing should lay these fears to rest. We often hear concerns about how poor immigrants will fare and whether their children will get trapped in low-paying jobs or dependent on government support. In their flight from famine, Irish immigrants are not too dissimilar from immigrants who flee hurricanes, earthquakes, and violent uprisings today. But, at the time, these groups were considered the poorest of the poor. ![]() Many prominent leaders, including politicians like President Biden, regularly emphasize pride in their Irish or Italian heritage. We are used to seeing the descendants of poor European immigrants rise to become members of the business and cultural elite. Today, we might not be that surprised to learn that the children of past European immigrants succeeded. But in the modern data we can see that this pattern applies to daughters as well. For the past, we are only able to study sons because we cannot link daughters who change their name at marriage. What’s more, some of the immigrant groups that politicians accused long ago of having little to contribute to the economy-the Irish, Italians, and Portuguese-actually achieved the highest rates of upward mobility. Our third finding is that the mobility advantage of the children of immigrants is just as strong today as it was in the past. The children of immigrants from Central American countries-countries like Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua that are often demonized for contributing to the “crisis” at the southern border-move up faster than the children of the U.S.-born, landing in the middle of the pack (right next to children of immigrants from Canada). The second notable takeaway is that even children of parents from very poor countries like Nigeria and Laos outperform the children of the U.S.-born raised in similar households. ![]() So, the mobility advantage that we observe for the children of immigrants would be even larger if we compared this group to the full population. We focus on the children of white U.S.-born fathers because the children of Black fathers tend to have lower rates of upward mobility. The first striking takeaway is that, as a group, children of immigrants achieve more upward mobility than the children of U.S.-born fathers. When we compiled this data, what do we see? The tax records allow researchers to link children to their parents as tax dependents, and then observe these children in the tax data as adults. Our modern data is based on federal income tax records instead. From here, we developed methods to automate these searches so we could follow millions of immigrants and their children in the records. We started by digging through websites like that allow the public to search for their relatives. Think of us like curious grandchildren searching branches of their family tree online, but a million times over. For the historical data, we used historical census records to link sons living in their childhood homes to census data collected 30 years later when these young men had jobs of their own. To conduct our analysis, we needed data that links children to parents. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |