Census figures show economic gap narrows with citizenship

Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla.

Foreign-born residents had higher rates of being employed full time than those born in the United States last year, and naturalized immigrants were more likely to have advanced degrees than the native-born, according to figures released Monday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The new figures show that the economic gap between the native-born and foreign-born in the United States appears to narrow with citizenship.

Immigrants who weren’t citizens had higher rates of poverty, lower income and less education last year compared with native-born citizens. But immigrants who were citizens had less poverty, close to equal earnings and higher rates of advanced degrees than native U.S. citizens.

“Naturalized citizens tend to have lived in the country longer than noncitizens ... They tend to have higher levels of education, and they tend to work in professions that have higher pay than noncitizens,” said Stefan Rayer, a demographer at the University of Florida. “Often times, these characteristics are interrelated, that is more education leading to higher earnings and lower rates of poverty.”

The 2018 figures from the Current Population Survey offer a view of immigrants’ education levels, wealth and the jobs they work in as the U.S. is engaged in one of the fiercest debates in decades about the role of immigration.

Stopping the flow of immigrants into the U.S. has been a priority of the Trump administration, which has proposed denying green cards to immigrants who use Medicaid and fought to put a citizenship question on the decennial Census questionnaire.

Monday’s figures also look at differences between naturalized immigrants and those who aren’t citizens. The U.S. in 2018 had 45.4 million foreign-born residents, or about 1 in 7 U.S. residents.

Education appears to play a role in narrowing the income gap between the native-born and the foreign-born.

Overall, naturalized immigrants had a slightly smaller median income than the native-born – $50,786 compared to $51,547 – but noncitizen immigrants trailed them both with a median income of $36,449.

But naturalized immigrants with a college degree surpassed college-educated natives’ income, and both naturalized immigrants and noncitizens with advanced degrees had higher median incomes than U.S. natives with advances degrees.

“Immigrants with advanced degrees, whether naturalized or not, may be more clustered in occupations with higher pay than the native population,” Rayer said.