Individual Level Results: Mexican Immigrants

Abstract

A great deal of the literature on poverty focuses on the impacts of various independent variables on poverty for specific race and ethnic groups, particularly Blacks and Hispanics. It has been my intention in this book to emphasize that while these groups may experience similar levels of poverty, their predictors differ. Indeed we saw this in the previous chapter. Immigrants in particular face the most severe of problems relative to this issue. Mexican immigrants are much apt to be in married couple households and be members of the workforce, yet they experience the highest poverty rates of any group in the nation. The insulation of marriage and full-time workforce participation does not seem to apply to this population. Hence, the analyses in this chapter are offered as a means to better understand these differences. Additionally, focus is placed upon the undocumented population through the use of a proxy independent variable, in an attempt to ascertain whether and the extent to which undocumented status impacts the likelihood of poverty.