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Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

A challenge with poverty rates in the US is that they often essentially proxy for "what proportion of the population recently immigrated from low-wage countries"; immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise and every actual human to be better off. California has ~10 million immigrants; many of them arrived rather recently.

(I think this is a variation on Simpson's paradox.)

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This is ancidotal, but there are a stupid amount of homeless in California. Virtually none of those immigrated here recently.

There is literally a second City of tents in Oakland under the freeway that stretches for miles. San Francisco has a similar problem, although it isn't as clear.

LA, San Diego, and other south west coast cities have beech bums and equal homeless problems. The fact is, homeless can survive here, where they wouldn't survive in Chicago, DC, New York, because it simply doesn't get too cold there.

And let's not forget all the cities in the US that send their homeless to CA, usually to SF or Berkeley, where the police and citizens are more tolerant than most places.

I befriended a homeless guy I saw every day walking to/from work. He never asked for money. I struck up a conversation, offered to buy him food and we talked for months, every few days (when I would sometimes buy him food). He had been a machinist in PA, got laid off, and got to N CA somehow. The weather made it easier to live outside, year round. I pushed him to get an ID, which is needed for pretty much anything, and he did. I haven't seen him in a couple of months, so I hope he got into a shelter.

So, the weather and tolerance is a big reason people come to CA when they are homeless or near homeless.

Is this really true for Mexican immigration? The stereotype is that the US gets Mexican peasants and Indian doctors, at least. Everything you say is true for the Indian doctor or Chinese software engineer.

Thus their departure would raise incomes in Mexico while lowering it in the US. So your point is mostly right, at least as it relates to this story.

It's possibly the middle class Mexican citizens who have the resources to make the journey across the border in the first place.

Middle class Mexican citizens can live good lives in Mexico, so they don't need to risk dangerous border crossing to end up a poor illegal immigrant in the US.

Happy and reassuring to have my conjecture rejected.

That's incorrect. As domestic wages rise in a poor nation, emigration rises because the burgeoning middle class is better able to leave. That's why the US saw such a dramatic increase in immigration from Latin America since 1980, as wages have soared (relatively) there. The US now sees more immigration from Latin America every ten years, than it did in a century from 1880-1980. The desperately poor aren't the primary source of emigration around the world, they're mostly unable to move from their location. It's overwhelmingly not the Chinese or Indian poor (a billion people earning sub $5 per day) that are emigrating to the US, it's their middle class and higher - the truly poor can't move from their spot.

One of the most obvious examples of this - for generations, health care professionals in low-development nations have been emigrating, seeking higher incomes in the developed world. That's despite the fact that they're almost always middle class or higher in their own country. You could see this in action over the last 50 years across poor nations in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America. Currently the middle class is flooding out of various poor Eastern European nations, seeking a better life in eg Britain.

There were about a dozen articles posted on HN about this concept when the Syrian refugee crisis was peaking.

Thanks for this perspective. I didn't know about this.

Right. When millions were starving in Ethiopia in mid-1980's there was no movement of migration towards Europe. People couldn't afford it, they didn't even know of the theoretical possibility.

Increased wealth and better access to information and information technology in African and Asian countries is what's pushed the recent migration towards Europe (via Turkey, Libya or Morocco) on the move.

I disagree with regard to Eastern European part. Most of the emigration was unskilled labor. They were not below poverty line, they could organize move to UK, but they were never middle class in Poland, etc, and they usually aren't middle class in the UK. The second batch of emigrants is graduates entering the job market sometimes with degrees irrelevant in current market. So they decide to start their career in another country, because they don't have much to lose. In another country they focus on climbing up, often in a career not related to their education or previous aspiration.

The doctors, etc are a minority. A visible minority, because their move harms their country of origin more than a loss of a builder from a social perspective but still a minority.

What you say is mostly true in the UK and what OP said is mostly true for the USA. The USA gets better immigrants.

At least partly true, in that immigration is a net benefit to nearly everyone.

I agree with this and support more or less open borders due to comparative advantage (even below average people can provide benefits due to trade). I was simply questioning whether Mexico is really sending us people above their mean/median.

Very tough to measure, as the most poor would be the most averse to tracking.

Would they have to? The USA has a GDP (PPP) per capita around 3x that of Mexico. The sheer magnitude of the difference in purchasing power would make patio11's claim true, even if they were hypothetically, in our president's words, sending us drug dealers, criminals, and rapists.

I'm not sure exactly what you are arguing for here, so please correct me if I'm wrong. You seem to to saying that the middle class in Mexico are not the same as middle class in the US because their wealth + income would not be regarded as middle class by US standards.

I don't think that is a good argument, since once they move to the US they would be making middle class wages in the US, since they have the relevant skills to be employed in middle class jobs.

It's a complex issue.

NAFTA fucked rural Mexico as a tidal wave of cheap corn flooded the economy and killed the smaller scale agriculture, just as it did in the US. You also have periods where economic crisis and monetary devaluation in Mexico wipes out a lot of middle class type people. A lot of laborers and construction guys came because of this.

You also have an insurgency in many parts of Mexico where the cartels have taken over and often little functional government exists. People there bug out if they can.

Many of the "peasant" immigrants are from Central America and pass through Mexico.

As far as economic impact, it's a complicated issue there too. The big land interests in Western States generally control the senate delegations pretty tightly. A lot of people are making a lot of money off of illegals, so if there were some major change, you'd see some sort of guest worker visa or change to labor laws (especially minimum wage, workers compensation and overtime) to keep the farms picked and slaughterhouses running.

No way.

The poorest people are rural whites and southern/inner city African Americans. The immigrant communities, especially Hispanic immigrants and some asians are harder to assess because they do old school immigrant things like pool resources in the community/extended family and work a lot, but off the books.

"The poorest people are rural whites and southern/inner city African Americans. "

I don't agree.

There are very large numbers of Central/South Americans who come to Cali, largely unskilled, and they occupy the biggest part of the economic underclass.

Think of how many are not even 'on the books'? I'd argue it's very difficult for an undocumented person to make that much.

It's not a 'moral' statement, it's just a reality of the blending of people from different civilizations in one pot.

Large scale migration from poor countries will definitely be a factor.

And as one commenter above noted - the 'weather' does as well.

Nice weather attracts more vagabonds. This is true in Canada s well, BC has way more street people than Ontario where it's extremely cold and extremely uncomfortable for street people in the winter. Again, not a moral statement. Just fairly rational human nature.

19% of SF's homeless are Hispanic, versus 15% of the general population.

36% of SF's homeless are African American, versus 7% of the general population.

The data doesn't back you up. The very poorest unable to even find housing are statistically more likely to be African American than Hispanic.

[1]:http://sfmayor.org/sites/default/files/FileCenter/Documents/...

SF is not California.

Moreover, it's not even the 'Bay Area' - it's a tiny, unrepresentative spot of 700 000 people.

Also - 'homelessness' is not the same thing as 'under the poverty line'.

California is 33% latino, and less than 7% African American.

African Americans might be more likely to be 'in poverty', sadly, but there are nearly 5x more Latino Americans than African Americans in California.

This does not even include a large population undocumented people, who are far more likely to be Latino than Black.

Here is the data:

https://www.census.gov/prod/2013pubs/acsbr11-17.pdf

In the US, Latino Americans are just slightly less likely to be 'in poverty' than African Americans. In California, with a 5x more population, that would very roughly boil down to 5x more Latino Americans in poverty than African Americans.

Hence my point.

From NYC: "African-American and Latino New Yorkers are disproportionately affected by homelessness. Approximately 58 percent of New York City homeless shelter residents are African-American, 31 percent are Latino, 7 percent are white, less than 1 percent are Asian-American, and 3 percent are of unknown race/ethnicity."

You also need to be very careful with context and analysis of "latino". Statistically, Latino is an overlay term representing cultural origin. Many African Americans identify as Latino.

Again, NYC is not America.

Again, we're talking about poverty rates, not homeless rates.

Yes, I understand 'Latino' is not always central/south American in the classic sense, but fyi - Latino's are far more likely to be classified as 'White' than 'African American' - i.e. Spanish, Cubans etc.

> immigration from e.g. Mexico to the US often causes the poverty rate in both countries to rise

Both countries? How's that work if it's poor Mexicans coming here?

Fun fact: most immigrants from Mexico are not poor-relative-to-Mexico.

Are we talking about immigrants or "immigrants"? I seriously doubt the immigrants of the illegal -- excuse me, "undocumented" -- variety are anything but poor. That's the reason the Mexican government is so eager to keep the whole thing going -- they get to simultaneously foist their poor upon the US while said poor send back billions in remittances. It's a major industry for Mexico, believe it or not.

Net illegal immigration from Mexico has been negative since 2009. http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/02/what-we-know...

That's because one person can be deported multiple times and the definition of "Deportation" has changed to include those apprehended at the border.

Can you provide more credible data on this?

Two seconds of Googling would have led you to this:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-obama-deportations-20140...

Which I'm sure you'll find credible since it's a left-leaning source.

That article does not dispute the claim that net immigration from Mexico has been negative.

Well duh, because it explains how the definition of deportation has changed to include catch and release, which wasn't the case beforehand. This is literally an article reassuring Democrats that Obama's deportation numbers are higher but don't fret about it, because it's not really the case.

Nobody knows for sure. There are only guesses for the number of immigrants and the net migration flow.

It takes a certain minimum amount of education and money to attempt the crossing. Poor yokels who try it get caught or die in the desert.

It also takes a minimum amount of ambition; lazy slobs can't be bothered. Fearful people don't want to risk being robbed or spending weeks out of work to end up deported and gaining nothing.

My relative's wife made the crossing because her husband was abusive and beat her and her son; he threatened to kill them both and had the connections to get away with it.

I'm not surprised. There are one or two particular foreign-crazed states in India where people often spend ~$50k on people to smuggle them across into Western Europe/US. They come apparently as refugees "fleeing religious persecution", but I fear this is often a mere ruse.

The routes they takes are often batshit crazy - the usual Afghanisthan-Egypt/Turkey-Europe route or the Guyana-Mexico-Texas/Cali route (this all the way from India!).

If the USA and Mexico set different thresholds for the poverty line, with the Mexican threshold being lower, then people above the Mexican poverty line but below the USA poverty line could emigrate. This would raise the poverty rate in both countries, but this is an artifact of the two countries differing definitions of poverty. But if you measured poverty in the entire USA+Mexico region using a single definition of poverty, you would see it decrease, assuming those immigrants are better off after moving. (Note that actually measuring poverty this way is difficult due to factors like differing currencies with exchange rates varying over time, so the concept of a unified poverty definition is mostly just theoretical.)

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