From this Year’s Annual Report: Understanding How the Legal Status of Immigrants Affects Economic Security
NYC Opportunity has long analyzed poverty in the city as a whole, and within specific populations, but until 2019 had not analyzed poverty and economic security among immigrants disaggregated by legal status. In 2019, NYC Opportunity issued the first immigrant-specific report.
This report sheds new light on the economic circumstances of immigrants, and the kinds of programs that could help them. It provides detailed information, such as immigrants’ labor force participation rates and earnings. The data is broken down by category of immigrants, including U.S. born citizens, naturalized citizens, other lawful residents, and undocumented immigrants.
The report contains an immigrant-specific version of the NYCgov Poverty Measure, a metric created by NYC Opportunity in 2008 to calculate the poverty of New York City residents more accurately than the federal poverty measure.
The 2019 immigrant report found that the NYCgov Immigrant Poverty Rate was higher than the rate for city residents as a whole, and significantly higher for undocumented immigrants. This higher poverty rate occurs despite higher labor force participation rates than most New Yorkers: the report concluded that more than three-quarters of undocumented immigrants in the city (76.6 percent) were in the labor force compared to 64.8 percent citywide.
The report would not have been possible without NYC Opportunity’s development of a new methodology to estimate the legal status of the immigrant population using census data. By providing policymakers with specific information on how widespread poverty is among specific groups, with particular attention to their legal status, the report can help the City to better focus interventions and help those in need.
