The United States, through mass illegal and legal immigration, is importing generations of poverty as the children of immigrants now account for 4-in-9 of all poor children living in the nation, the New York Times reveals.
In a report detailing vast poverty rates among the children of illegal and legal immigrants, the Times notes that “more than 40 percent of the country’s poor children are children of immigrants.”
Roughly 50 percent of those impoverished migrant youth are “anchor babies,” the term given to the U.S.-born children of illegal aliens as they are awarded birthright American citizenship despite their parents residing illegally in the nation.
The data suggests that anchor babies account for 2-in-10 poor children in the U.S.
“The solution is to stop importing poverty,” the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector told the Times, advocating for an overall reduction to legal immigration levels in addition to drastically cutting illegal immigration.
The Times reports:
Children of immigrants, the fastest-growing group of American youths, have poverty rates more than twice those of other children. That is partly because their families earn less than native workers, but also because they face more barriers to government support. The barriers are largest for children of undocumented immigrants, but families of legal immigrants face obstacles, too. [Emphasis added]
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“The more welfare that immigrants use, the more difficult it becomes to afford anti-poverty initiatives for the native-born,” said Steven A. Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that seeks to sharply reduce immigration. [Emphasis added]
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Fully 44 percent of poor children have an immigrant parent, according to research by Ms. Acevedo-Garcia, the Urban Institute, and UnidosUS, a Latino advocacy group. Nearly a fifth of poor children have an undocumented parent. [Emphasis added]
Camarota’s research for the Center for Immigration Studies has routinely found widespread taxpayer-funded welfare use among illegal and legal immigrants.
In 2019, for example, Camarota found that immigrant-headed households use nearly twice as much welfare as households headed by native-born Americans. Whereas 63 percent of households headed by immigrants, both illegal and legal, use some form of public welfare, just 35 percent of native-born households used welfare.
Likewise, in 2021, Camarota again discovered that the majority of immigrant-headed households were using some form of welfare at much higher rates than native-born Americans. While 31 percent of immigrant-headed households are on food stamps, for instance, fewer than 20 percent of native-born households use the program.
Though economist George Borjas has called the U.S. immigration system “the largest anti-poverty program in the world” at the expense of America’s working and middle class, President Joe Biden’s administration has lowered standards to ensure welfare-dependent foreign nationals can secure green cards.
In 2022, the foreign-born population hit nearly 47 million — the largest immigrant population ever recorded by the Census Bureau. Further research shows that the nation’s overall immigration levels are driving 80 percent of all population growth.
Since 1970, the nation’s foreign-born population has quintupled and since 1980, it has tripled in size. In 1990, the foreign-born population was just half of what it is today — with 1-in-7 U.S. residents having been born outside of the country.
The majority of new arrivals come through the nation’s legal immigration system, which gives out about a million green cards annually as well as more than a million temporary work visas to take blue-collar jobs that would otherwise go to working and lower-middle class Americans.
At current legal immigration levels, the Census Bureau projects that about 1-in-6 U.S. residents will be foreign-born by 2060, with the foreign-born population hitting a record 69 million.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.