Children in Immigrant Families--The U.S. and 50 States: Economic Need beyond the Official Poverty Measure. Research Brief Series. Publication #2009-19.

Few would deny that reducing child poverty is a worthy goal for this nation, or any nation. Far less agreement exists about the best way to measure poverty. Increasingly, though, informed voices have raised questions about the adequacy of the official U.S. poverty measure. This Research Brief , the second in our series on immigrant children, draws on new results from Census 2000 data to examine differences in the poverty rates between children in immigrant families and children in native-born families. The brief reports results for the official poverty measure, but also for two alternatives to the official measure. Most notably, the official poverty measure does not explicitly take into account what families need to spend for housing, food, and other necessities; transportation for work; child care/early education; income and payroll taxes; and differences in the cost of living across geographic areas of the country. We calculated a new “baseline basic budget poverty” measure that takes into account the costs of housing, food, other necessities, transportation for work, and federal income/payroll taxes. We calculated a second new measure—which might be termed “baseline basic budget poverty plus”—that also takes into account the costs for formal child care and early education. Our calculations show that when the new Baseline Basic Budget Poverty measure for children is used, the rate of poverty is much higher than that suggested by the official measure. Moreover, children in immigrant families tend to live in states showing large gaps in the two measures and these gaps widen further when the costs for child care and early education are taken into account. These results also suggest that policies and programs to combat childhood poverty, to be truly effective, should consider the full range of costs that strain family budgets. Taking this approach could especially benefit immigrant children, who are more likely to experience poverty than are their native-born peers.