Abstract
Research on Chinese Americans often centers on successful economic incorporation in American society (e.g., “model minority”). Unfortunately, previous research has overlooked the changing economic circumstances of native- and foreign-born Chinese children, despite the fact that Chinese children living in America are diverse in socioeconomic status and geographic origin. In this paper, we use data from the 1990 and 2000 censuses to compare levels and changes in child poverty rates among U.S.-born Chinese and immigrants from Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong, and to investigate how changes in maternal employment and family structure (including cohabitation) contributed to the decline in poverty rates in the 1990s. Compared to other Asian Americans and non-Asians, Chinese children in the U.S. are less likely to live in poverty, thanks in part to more married-couple families and higher levels of maternal employment. Yet, child poverty rates vary among Chinese American subpopulations—being lowest for children of U.S.-born Chinese and highest for children of mainland-born Chinese. In addition, we find that poverty among U.S.-born and Taiwan-born Chinese would have been even lower had their rates of divorce and cohabitation had been similar to those for mainland-born and Hong Kong-born Chinese.
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Notes
For example, poverty rates among black and white children were 34.0 and 9.3%, respectively, in 2000. Black children’s poverty rates were more than three times greater than white children’s rates. If these black and white children had the same distributions across family types, black children’s poverty rate would be less than twice as large of the poverty rate for whites, or 1.9 times greater.
Poverty data are available from the long form of the 1990 and 2000 decennial censuses, which will not be available in 2010, when the long form was discontinued.
The breakdown of the family often leaves children living with their mothers only, which increases the risk of children living in poverty. Most poor children lived in female-headed families in the 1990s (U.S. Bureau of the Census 2004). Eggebeen and Lichter (1991) showed that about one-half of the rise in child poverty during the 1980s was due to shifts of children from married couples families to “high-risk” female headed families.
To illustrate, the 2000 poverty rate is equal to the sum of poverty rates for each racial group, weighted by each racial group’s representation in the overall population (the population’s racial composition). Likewise, the poverty rate also equals the sum of poverty rates for each family type, weighted by population’s distribution into different family types.
These data indicate that changes in maternal employment among married Chinese mothers accounted for very little of the decline in child poverty. These changes have been too small to generate any significant effects on changes in child poverty rates.
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Qian, Z., Lichter, D.T. & Crowley, M. Chinese Children Among the Poor: Comparing U.S. Natives with Immigrants from Taiwan, Mainland China, and Hong Kong. Race Soc Probl 2, 137–148 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-010-9034-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12552-010-9034-y