Robert Samuelson is one of the most honest and sharply intelligent economists writing for public consumption. I don't always agree with him but I find it very hard ever to get around him. In his recent column he parses the government's annual report on poverty and household income.
The standard story is that poverty is stuck; superficially, the statistics support that. The poverty rate measures the share of Americans below the official poverty line, which in 2006 was $20,614 for a four-person household. Last year, the poverty rate was 12.3 percent, down slightly from 12.6 percent in 2005 but higher than the 11.3 percent in 2000, the recent low. It was also higher than the 11.8 percent average for the 1970s. So the conventional wisdom seems amply corroborated.
These statistics are usually relied on to show that we (or more commonly George W.) are making no progress against poverty, presumably because we (and especially he) don't really care about our poorer citizens. Whether we care or not, Samuelson show that we have made a lot of progress against poverty.
From 1990 to 2006, the number of poor Hispanics increased 3.2 million, from 6 million to 9.2 million. Meanwhile, the number of non-Hispanic whites in poverty fell from 16.6 million (poverty rate: 8.8 percent) in 1990 to 16 million (8.2 percent) in 2006. Among blacks, there was a decline from 9.8 million in 1990 (poverty rate: 31.9 percent) to 9 million (24.3 percent) in 2006. White and black poverty has risen somewhat since 2000, but is down over longer periods.
Samuelson is right to complain that this story is almost completely ignored by the press. I think that the left is at odds with itself here: it doesn't want to talk about progress because that might reduce the case for more efforts; but it fails to give credit for the efforts we have made. And in fact, most forms of government assistance are ignored in these figures, so the real situation of a lot of low income families is better than represented.
I am not sure that the facts about immigration that he reports are as bad as he makes them sound. Marxists have long argued that capitalism generates a persistent poverty at some level in order to supply the economy with cheap workers. It may well be that when the number of domestic entry level workers falls below a certain threshold (perhaps around 12%), the economy becomes magnetized and draws in workers from where ever there is a surplus. There are winners and losers to be sure, but it gives a lot of people in other places a chance they would not otherwise have. And immigrants to the U.S. use that chance.
Paradoxically, many Hispanics are advancing quite rapidly. But assimilation -- which should be our goal -- will be frustrated if we keep adding to the pool of poor. Newcomers will compete with earlier arrivals. In my view, though some economists disagree, competition from low-skilled Hispanics also hurts low-skilled blacks.
There is some confusion here. It's true that importing large numbers of uneducated, unskilled workers who can't speak English keeps the poverty rate up, and puts pressure on the least competitive domestic workers. But that has no necessary effect on assimilation. I suspect that Hispanic immigrants are acquiring skills, education, and English about as fast as immigrants tend to do. It's just that we keep replacing the stock.
Samuelson thinks we should favor skilled immigrants over unskilled immigrants, a position with which I agree (except in the case of college professors). We don't want more competition there, for heaven's sake. I think that bringing the border under control would clearly relieve a lot of social, economic, and political problems, including lifting the wages of unskilled domestic workers. But that's not to say we should cut off the flow of unskilled workers altogether. My own ancestors came here, I suspect, with nothing more than a will to do better. America ought always to be offering that chance to someone.
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