Abstract
This chapter provides an extensive overview of prior studies and research related to the incidence of poverty among Mexican Americans and immigrants in the United States. It is divided into six sub-sections including a general overview of poverty and how it is defined according to the US government; a discussion of the utility and necessity for a relative measure of poverty; a review of the literature dealing with the micro and macro level predictors of poverty among all groups in the US; a discussion of how immigrants in particular are impacted by poverty; a history of the migration trends between Mexico and the US; a discussion of the most important policies enacted relative to this population and their impacts; and a presentation of the expected contributions to be made by this book. This chapter concludes with a brief accounting of policy changes which have had or are estimated to have the greatest impacts on the Mexican American and immigrant population.
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- 1.
This is based on the finding made by the USDA’s 1955 Food Consumption Survey which showed that families of three or more spent approximately one third of their total income on food.
- 2.
Poverty statistics in ACS products adhere to the standards specified by the Office of Management and Budget in Statistical Policy Directive 14. The Census Bureau uses a set of dollar value thresholds that vary by family size and composition to determine who is in poverty. Further, poverty thresholds for people living alone or with nonrelatives (unrelated individuals) vary by age (under 65 years or 65 years and older). The poverty thresholds for two-person families also vary by the age of the householder. If a family’s total income is less than the dollar value of the appropriate threshold, then that family and every individual in it are considered to be in poverty. Similarly, if an unrelated individual’s total income is less than the appropriate threshold, then that individual is considered to be in poverty.
- 3.
The measure for relative poverty considered in the analyses is limited by the fact that the estimates are based on average household median incomes made available by the Census. It is meant to provide a general estimation of relative poverty and has been applied to all households regardless of age/household size given the similarities in family structure.
- 4.
The National Bureau of Economic Research measured the duration of the recession as lasting from March to November of 2001. This recession had the largest impacts upon Hispanic and Black households, eroding about one quarter of their wealth within 2 years (Kochhar 2004).
- 5.
The “residual method” is used to estimate the undocumented migrant population and is obtained by subtracting the estimated legal-immigrant population from the total foreign-born population. The residual value is then treated as the source of data for the unauthorized population.
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Garcia, G. (2011). Prior Studies. In: Mexican American and Immigrant Poverty in the United States. The Springer Series on Demographic Methods and Population Analysis, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-0539-5_2
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