The Bottom 10 Performing Immigrant Groups in the US – Lessons Learned
In my last post, I looked at the top ten immigrant groups by country of origin to the US, ranked by their per capita income in the US. In this post, I want to look at the bottom ten countries. Here’s some information on those countries (data sources mentioned at the bottom of the post):
(click to embiggen)
(note – this is a corrected table. Thanks to reader Mike B for pointing out the error in the last column of the table.)
The first thing to note is that Saudi Arabia is an outlier. Based on median age, education, and income, the composite Saudi immigrant described by this table is either a graduate student, a layabout, or something in between. Many Saudis may be receiving income from sources that are not accounted for in this table; from my limited experience, Saudi expats I have come across seem to receive a stipend, which is born out from other sources, though it seems those stipends are getting cut due to falling oil prices.
Leaving aside the Saudis, these groups of immigrants all have a per capita income in the US that exceeds their home country’s GDP per capita. Think of that as a rough measure of the difference between the benefits generated by the institutions and capital created by Americans and the benefits generated by the institutions and capital created by their former compatriots.
However, a not-insignificant part of that income comes in the form of transfers from the US taxpayer. For instance, each of these immigrants groups (except the Nepalese) receive cash transfers and food stamps at rates far in excess the native born population. For example, fully two thirds of Somali immigrants in the US are on food stamps compared to 12.7% of the native born population. Many members of these groups also speak poor English. This includes people who have lived in the country for a long time.
In comments to an earlier post in this series, Run75441 recommended this essay on US demographics by Joel Garreau. I was struck by this passage:
This is crucial to everyone who plans to retire, because once you do, you’ll want a bunch of young, hardworking, tax-paying people supporting you, whether directly, through family contributions, or indirectly, through Social Security or pension programs. Unless you’re rich enough to live off your investments, there is no alternative. As it happens, retirement is on the minds of many, and not just in the United States.
Based on the table above, it is clear that if the goal of our immigration process is to alleviate the problem Garreau identified, we are simply not doing it right. With few exceptions, people who maintain a dependence on food stamps are not likely to generate a surplus for the Social Security Trust Fund over their lifetime. For immigration to be a fix for our retirement program, we need to increase the likelihood that immigrants to the country will be productive and contribute to the institutions that we have collectively built. This can be done either by being more selective about immigrants and/or by finding ways to ensure that the immigrants that are here become, on average, more productive.
Identifying characteristics of immigrants who succeed in America will be the topic of the next post in this series.
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Notes…
Data used in this post comes from two sources. The first is GDP per capita, by country, obtained from the World Bank. The post also uses information obtained from the Census Department’s 2014 American Community Survey. In particular, the post uses the 2014 per capita income of immigrants to the US by nation of origin. It also uses the percentage of the immigrants from a given country that have arrived in the US prior to the year 2000. That data is kind of unwieldy to find, but the starting point is here. To be clear, immigrants in this source are foreign born, which is to say first generation only. Only immigrants alive at the time of the survey are included.
As always, if you want my data, drop me a line at my first name (mike) dot my last name (kimel – that’s with one m, not two) at gmail dot com. Occasionally I get data requests six or seven years after a post. While I always try to comply with these requests, I reserve the right to change computers, have them stolen, or to drop dead if too much time has elapsed between this writing and a request for data occurs.
Recent previous posts on this topic:
Economic Outcomes of Immigrants v. Stay at Home
The top ten immigrant groups by country of origin to the US, ranked by their per capita income in the US.
I don’t have the data to do it, but it would be interesting to see how the top 10 groups (in terms of income in the US) from the previous post, and the bottom 10 groups from this post fare in countries other than the US. If a group of people fares poorly in the US, it can be argued that this may be to some extent the fault of the US for failing to integrate members of that group properly, perhaps due to discrimination or racism. (I think the high correlation between home country gdp per capita and per capita income of the immigrants in the US mitigates against that argument a bit, but YMMV.) However, if a group of people does poorly in their native land, in the US, and in a variety of other countries, then it becomes more likely that the members of the group are imbued with cultural traits which are holding them back. Fortunately, most such traits can be changed, but the first thing to do is identify the existence of a problem.
The two major outliers on benefits are both recent refugee groups (Somali, Iraq). This seems equivalent to taking Vietnamese performance in 1976-1977 and assuming it was stable.
If we ignore them (and Saudi Arabia, for the reasons you stated above), the interesting variances are Burma (Myanmar)–which may well be the same ‘fugee situation (1998-2008 were not kind, followed by a 2011 cyclone)–and, in the other direction, El Salvador.
Everyone else appears fairly in line with late-comers without an established community to leverage.
Ken,
Apologies for extending the quote farther than it should have gone. Clumsy fingers on a very small phone….
“….. it is clear that if the goal of our immigration process is to alleviate the problem Garreau identified, we are simply not doing it right.” Kimel
Where does that assumption of the goal of our immigration process derive from? It is not, at this time, the policy goal of our immigration laws as stated by the US Citizenship and Immigration Services to focus on encouraging immigration based upon the immigrants’ productive capacity. At present immigration policy and procedures aims at accomplishing three major goals. “Immigrant visas are now divided into 3 separate categories: family-sponsored, employment-based, and “diversity” immigrants selected from countries with low immigration volumes by lottery.”
It is interesting to note that Garreau has not come to the same conclusion that you seem to be driving at. His words just before your quoted section elucidates his point of view on the topic of immigration.
“However that debate is resolved, it’s probably worth noting a few historical assimilation practices in the United States. First, this country has a long and distinguished record of taking illiterate peasants from every desert, tundra and bog and turning them into overfed suburbanites in three generations or less. Second, new immigrants usually do not marry outside their ethnic group; their adult children do, with some controversy, and their adult grandchildren can’t remember what the fuss was all about. Finally, the traditional deal America has offered immigrants is: work, pay taxes, learn English, send your kids to school and stay out of trouble with the law, and we’ll pretty much leave you alone.”
“One fortuitous result of the enormous wave of immigrants coming to the United States is that the median age here is only a little over 35, one of the lowest among the world’s more developed countries. This country also has the most productive population per person of any country on the planet—no matter how you measure it, and especially compared with Japan and the members of the European Union.”
Well jack:
Glad you took the time to read it.
Jack,
Garreau is implicitly assuming that all immigrants are the same except for their age. His conclusion flows naturally from that assumption.
As to the goal of immigration, the Immugration service policies are more a mission statement as to how they want to treat immigrants than an explanation of what the purpose of immigration should be. Garreau’s comment about saving social security may be wrong but at least it provides a philosophical underpinning to the whole endeavor. What should the purpose of immigration policy be? If you ask me it comes back to the preamble of the Constitution. Our first question about whether we admit new people into the club should be whether it makes, collectively, Ourselves and Our Posterity better off. But that’s my opinion.
Mike:
The preamble had nothing to do with what you claim. It was simply an explanation of why they change from the Articles of Confederation to a Constitution.
Run,
I don’t want get into a discussion of the Constitution i but I like to think of the Preamble as a set of general principles as to why we should or should not do something.