End Notes
 

¹ In this paper the term poor is used to mean persons living below the poverty threshold.

² Unrelated individuals under age 15 who are mostly foster children are not included in most official poverty statistics and they are not included in this study.

³ While there are many criticisms of this official definition, most observers agree that persons living below the poverty line are quite poor by American standards. For a brief discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of our current definition see Devine and Wright (1993).

⁴ By itself this does not mean that immigrants are a net drain. But a report published by the National Research Council in 1997 found that at the present time the net drain on public coffers (tax revenue minus services used) caused by immigrant households was between $11 billion and $22 billion a year (Edmunston and Smith, 1997). The high rate of immigrant poverty is partly responsible for this fiscal drain.

⁵ The 1 percent public use sample is used for analysis of metropolitan statistical areas.

⁶ For the 1980 Census, the study uses a 60,000 person sample drawn from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series provided by the University of Minnesota.

⁷ These figures are for the 1998 CPS.

⁸ These figures are only for primary family members, as defined by the Census Bureau. Individuals in subfamilies along with those not in a family, such as persons living alone, are not included in these statistics. Such persons are included in all other poverty statistics reported in this study.

⁹ These numbers are based on the author's tabulations of March 1996 CPS.

¹⁰ Additional information provided by Dr. Jeffrey Passel of the Urban Institute in personal communication, July, 12 1999.

¹¹ These results also mean that the poverty rate for persons in immigrant households who are not illegal is 19.6 percent. While this is somewhat lower than the poverty rate of 21.8 percent when illegal aliens are included, it is still 63 percent higher than the 12 percent for persons in native households.

¹² It is important to keep in mind that the same households are not being observed in 1979, 1989 and 1997. Moreover, the general characteristics of household composition changes for each cohort over time. Even so, a clear pattern does emerge from comparing cohorts over time.

¹³ It is important to keep in mind that these calculation exclude poverty among persons under age 25.

¹⁴ Comparisons cannot be made between the Census and CPS for the American Indian/other category because "other" is not a choice on the CPS. Since this response is only possible in the Census, the figures from 1997 are for only American Indians.

¹⁵ Persons are considered of working age if they are at least 15 years of age.

¹⁶ This report uses the standard Census Bureau definition of geographic regions of the country. The Northeast region includes: Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The Midwest includes: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. The South includes: Delaware, Maryland, Washington D.C., Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. The West includes Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, and Hawaii.

¹⁷ Proportionately, the increase in New Jersey in immigrant-related poverty was much larger than in New York State.

¹⁸ The very large sample size in the CPS in these two states allows for a more detailed examination of immigrant-related poverty that is possible in other states.

¹⁹ Comparisons are only made in the 32 states with more than 100,000 persons residing in immigrant households at the time of the March 1998 CPS.

²⁰ The original census data for counties were drawn from 1990 Census Summary Tape File 4 tabulations of poverty status by nativity for families and unrelated individuals (Tables 108 and 120). To show poverty for the total population in counties regardless of whether they were living in a family, it was necessary to combine the two tabulations. (Persons in families, are by definition, related to the household head) Since the tabulations for families do not specify how many people are in each family, an analysis of PUMS data was used to create factors to translate numbers of families into their corresponding numbers of persons. First, the average family size was tabulated for families above and below poverty according to the nativity of the head and state of residence. These four average family size figures per state (above and below poverty for persons in families in native and immigrant families) were then multiplied by the corresponding counts of families based on the nativity of the head in each county of every state. This yielded counts of persons in immigrant and native headed families by poverty status for all counties. Adding these counts of persons in families to the counts of unrelated individuals using their individual nativity yielded the final data used to generate Maps 2, 3 and 4. While not exactly the same as the method used in the rest of the study, combining tables from the summary tape files in this way comes as close as possible to matching the definition of immigrant and native households used to create the tabulations found in Tables 1 though 15 and Map 1.

²¹ The same definition of household is used in the logistic regression as in tabulations reported in Tables 1 through 15.

²² The dummy variables in the model are set at .5.

²³ There is currently a large backlog of persons waiting to enter in the spouses and minor children of Lawful Permanent Residents category. A significant portion of these individuals are the family members of IRCA amnesty beneficiaries. It seems unwise to continue to separate these families. Therefore, it would make sense to grandfather in those already on the waiting list. However, no future applications would be taken for the spouses and minor children of LPRs.

²⁴ In 1997 unskilled employment-based immigration was temporally lowered to 5,000 to offset amnesty given some illegal aliens from Central America. It will remain at this level until all those eligible have adjusted to legal status.

²⁵ 1996 is the most recent year for which data is available. This figure is from the Statistical Abstract of the United States: 1998 and does not include cash assistance for foster care or the EITC.