Washington (September 1, 2022) – While young-adult children of immigrants are doing reasonably well overall, second-generation Hispanics are well behind Americans with U.S.-born parents across a host of measures, including educational levels, the share in or near poverty, on Medicaid, and average income.
A new study from the Center for Immigration Studies, using government data collected in 2021, measures the socio-economic status of U.S.-born adults (ages 25 to 29) with immigrant parents (second-generation Americans). It focuses on this age group because by that age individuals have traditionally become independent of their parents, but are still young enough that their immigrant parents are relatively recent arrivals, making their situation more relevant to the current immigration debate.
The study finds that the average income, poverty rates, and educational attainment of these younger second-generation adults nearly equals that of Americans of the same age with U.S.-born parents. It does find that the second generation overall does tend to lag those with U.S.-born parents in labor force participation and Medicaid use, though the differences are not large.
However, this overall picture obscures the situation for second-generation Hispanics, who comprise more than half of all children born to immigrants in recent decades. Second-generation Hispanics lag behind those with U.S.-born parents in educational attainment, average income. the share in or near poverty, and the share on Medicaid. Though they lag behind Americans with U.S.-born parents in most ways, second-generation Hispanics are still much better off than were their immigrant parents.
It also bears mentioning that second-generation Americans aged 25 to 29 examined in this analysis are not the children of today’s immigrants. On average, we estimate that the parents of even these relatively younger adults arrived nearly four decades ago. The vast majority of children born to the immigrants who arrived in the last 30 years are too young to measure their socio-economic status separately from their parents.
“The data show younger adults born in the United States to immigrants are doing reasonably well relative to younger American adults with U.S-born parents,” said Steven Camarota, the Center’s Director of Research and report’s lead author. “However,” he added, “the situation for U.S.-born Hispanics is different. Unfortunately, many of them do struggle, though they are clearly much better off than were their immigrant parents.”
