Children in Immigrant Families – the U.s. and 50 States: Economic Need beyond the Official 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.