Immigration :: essays research papers

Should in-migration into the United States be limited?Immigrants argon a large and lifting factor in the stubborn level of penury seen in the United States over the past two decades because newcomers to the country are more likely to be unequal and to remain so time-consuming than in the past, according to a new study. The cut through, to be released today by the Center for Immigration Studies, narrates the itemise of impoverished people in the nations immigrant-headed households or so tripled from 2.7 million in 1979 to 7.7 million in 1997. During that same period, the number of poor households headed by immigrants increase by 123 portion while the number of immigrant households increased by 68 percent, according to the study. The share of immigrants living in pauperisation rose from 15.5 percent to 21.8 percent, the report notes, a change that some analysts say holds troubling implications for the nations future. About 12 percent of the nations native-born population liv es in distress, a figure that has hardly changed in 20 years. "Each consecutive wave of immigrants is doing worse and worse," said Steven A. Camarota, the reports author. "Each wave of immigrants has a high poverty rate, and a much larger share of their children will grow up in poverty." The report by the center, a Washington-based research concourse that advocates reduced immigration, uses schooling compiled in the 1980 and 1990 censuses, as well as information contained in the March 1998 Current Population Survey, to make its case that poverty in the United States is increasingly being driven by the nations immigration policy. The report says immigrants are more likely to be poor because they film higher levels of unemployment, have lower education levels and have larger families than native-born families. And much of their economic slide has come despite the fact that the nations preservation has been in good shape for much of the past 20 years, the report notes. The report is rekindling the sharp-edged debate over whether high levels of immigration benefit the nation. The number of immigrants living in the United States has almost tripled since 1970, dramatically altering the nations demographic and social mix because the vast majority of current immigrants are both Hispanic or Asian. Overall, immigrants now account for nearly 10 percent of the nations residents, the highest level since the 1920s. About one in four Californians and one in three residents of New York are foreign-born.