New research from the Pew Cen­ter finds that the chil­dren of ille­gal immi­grants in the US are twice as likely to live in poverty as other chil­dren. Of course, the law is that those chil­dren born in the US are cit­i­zens. How­ever the par­ents fear get­ting social ser­vices for those chil­dren out of fear of being deported.

From the Wash­ing­ton Post, writer N.C. Aizen­man presents some of the Pew Center’s findings.

Forty per­cent — or 3.3 mil­lion of these chil­dren — have at least one par­ent who is an ille­gal immi­grant, mostly from Mex­ico or Cen­tral Amer­ica, accord­ing to a recent analy­sis of cen­sus data by demog­ra­pher Jef­frey S. Pas­sel of the Pew His­panic Cen­ter. And researchers warn that the long-term con­se­quences for the coun­try could be profound.

“The fact that so many in this pop­u­la­tion face these ini­tial dis­ad­van­tages has huge impli­ca­tions in terms of their edu­ca­tion, their future labor mar­ket expe­ri­ence, their inte­gra­tion in the broader soci­ety, and their polit­i­cal par­tic­i­pa­tion,” said Roberto Gon­za­les, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Wash­ing­ton who has stud­ied this generation.

The most imme­di­ate result has been a sub­stan­tial increase in the num­ber of Amer­i­can chil­dren grow­ing up in poverty. Partly because ille­gal immi­grants tend to have low lev­els of edu­ca­tion and partly because their immi­gra­tion sta­tus makes it harder to move up the job lad­der, their U.S.-born chil­dren are almost twice as likely to be poor as the chil­dren of legal immi­grants or native par­ents, the Pew His­panic Cen­ter found.

To sup­port­ers of immi­grants, that’s an argu­ment for offer­ing a path to legal­iza­tion for the adults in “mixed-status fam­i­lies.” These are house­holds in which the par­ents are in the coun­try ille­gally while their U.S.-born chil­dren are enti­tled to all the ben­e­fits and aid that their par­ents are not.

“When you talk about some­one who is undoc­u­mented, the chances are extremely high that they are in a mixed-status fam­ily.… Legal­iza­tion would be one of the best anti-poverty strate­gies we could employ,” said Frank Sharry, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the advo­cacy group America’s Voice.

But advo­cates for stricter immi­gra­tion laws see these fam­i­lies as one of the most com­pelling rea­sons to clamp down on ille­gal immigration.

“Not because [ille­gal immi­grants] are rip­ping us off or don’t work hard,” said Mark Kriko­rian, exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Cen­ter for Immi­gra­tion Stud­ies, “but because they’re col­lect­ing ben­e­fits for their chil­dren. In our soci­ety, peo­ple with a fifth-grade edu­ca­tion can hold two or three jobs and still not afford to sup­port their fam­i­lies. There’s no way for them to avoid putting a strain on the social-welfare system.”

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