Income

Census released official income data for 2007 this morning. A few things I noticed skimming the report:

• The share and number of uninsured declined between 2006 and 2007, but it looks like all the credit goes to public health insurance programs—including Medicare, Medicaid, and SCHIP. The share of Americans with private coverage declined, but the increase in coverage by public programs more than offset this decline.
• Median income increased modestly and poverty overall remained about the same, but child poverty, as officially measured, increased substantially, from 17.4 percent of children in 2006 to 18 percent in 2007.
• Income inequality (measured by shares of household income) declined a bit, but it was all due to gains for the middle and upper middle (the third and fourth quintiles) and a decline for the top quintile—the share of household income for the bottom 40 percent of Americans remained flat.

Important to remember: things have gotten a lot worse over the past year, something these numbers don't reflect. And, income remains lower and poverty higher than in 2000.

Some conservatives argue that America's extreme income inequality is a praiseworthy thing because it goes hand in hand with greater economic mobility. In a new working paper, Lane Kenworthy and Co. find no such relationship:

Markus Gangl (University of Wisconsin), Joakim Palme (Institute for Futures Studies in Stockholm), and I have a paper that averages income over 18 years in Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Eighteen years isn’t a full work life, but it’s the best we can do with existing panel data sets. .... As the number of years over which income is averaged increases, the amount of measured inequality decreases. But it decreases at the same rate in each of the three countries. America’s position does not improve.

I want to second John's concern that the new measure proposed by Mayor Bloomberg, while a "useful step forward" from the current poverty measure, is also likely "to narrow and technocratic to have much resonance outside of policy circles."

My own personal favorite is a measure that sets poverty based on a percentage of median income, say 50 or 60 percent, the lineage of which goes straight back to Adam Smith. The basic idea is that poverty can only be defined in connection to the economic mainstream. Notably, this type of measure produces poverty thresholds that are much more consistent with where the public believes income poverty starts, according to public opinion surveys.

The median income approach to defining poverty is commonly called a relative poverty measure, but it's actually more objective in social terms than either the current US poverty measure or measures like that proposed by Mayor Bloomberg. As social scientists Lee Rainwater and Tim Smeeding note in their book, Poor Kids in a Rich Country, "Anchoring the poverty line in terms of the median is a way of focusing on mainstream incomes and talking them as a point of departure in measuring poverty."

The main findings from a new EPI briefing paper on income volatility by Jacob Hacker and Elisabeth Jacobs:

The instability of family incomes has risen substantially over the last three decades. Although the precise magnitude of the increase depends on the approach to measuring income variance that is used, we estimate that short-term family income variance essentially doubled from 1969-2004. Much of the rise in income volatility occurred prior to 1985, and volatility dropped substantially in the late 1990s. It has, however, risen in recent years to exceed its 1980s peak.

The proportion of working-age individuals experiencing a large drop in their family income (50% or greater) has climbed more steadily—from less than 4% in the early 1970s to nearly 10% in the early 2000s. The probability of large income drops varies predictably with the business cycle. Yet it has also trended strongly upward over time. For instance, the 2001 recession, which was mild in macroeconomic terms, was associated with a higher chance of large income drops than the recession of the early 1980s, which was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

There is an important distinction between family income (total earnings, asset income, and transfer income for all members of a family) and individual earnings. While the instability of individual male workers' earnings rose sharply between the 1970s and 1980s, it has been more or less stable since then, trending up and down with the business cycle through the 1980s and 1990s, and rising again in the early 2000s. This basic trend—a rise in earnings variability in the 1970s, little clear trend from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and an upswing in the early 2000s—has been confirmed by numerous analyses, including a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Moreover, this same basic pattern can be seen in data from both the survey-based Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) (which is used in this brief) and the administratively collected Continuous Work History Sample (CWHS) of the Social Security Administration (used by the CBO).

Contrary to assertions in the popular press, women's increased workforce participation has not been a major factor contributing to the rise in family income volatility. Female earnings have, if anything, become more stable since the 1980s. Male workers have experienced a larger and more sustained rise in earnings instability. Because men's earnings account for a larger percentage of total household income than do women's earnings, on average, rising instability in male earnings helps account for the increase in family income volatility. In short, the stabilizing influence on family income of the decrease in female earnings instability is overwhelmed by the rise in men's earnings instability.

In addition to the increase in male earnings variability, other likely causes of rising family income volatility include the growing variability of cash transfers and the limited cushioning effect of having a second earner in the household. Although the evidence is limited, there is reason to believe that a second family earner is less of a benefit in terms of income protection today than it was prior to the 1990s. Indeed, in 2004, if a male worker's earnings fell, on average his spouse's earnings fell as well, exacerbating, rather than offsetting, the loss.

While less educated and poorer Americans have less-stable family incomes than their better-educated and wealthier peers, the increase in family income volatility affects all major demographic and economic groups. Indeed, Americans with at least four years of college experienced a larger increase in family income instability than those with only a high-school education over the past generation, with most of the rise occurring in the last 15 years.

Finally, levels of family income volatility appear to be extremely high. Family income drops of 50% or greater affected nearly one in 10 non-elderly adults during the early 2000s. Meanwhile, earnings in the United States are also quite variable. The CBO's recent analysis of earnings variance using the CWHS suggests that around 15% of workers experience a drop in their earnings of 50% or greater every year—a level comparable to what we find using the PSID.

In an earlier post, I noted some recent polling on where most Americans would draw the poverty line, and the amount of income needed to be "middle class." In that same vein, in a recent Monkey Cage post, political scientist John Sides discusses a survey he recently conducted that asks the following question:

How much income do you think the average American household earns in a year? If you do not know, you can just give your best guess.

According to Sides, "the median answer was $40,000. The actual median [income] is $48,000. On average, people’s estimates are fairly accurate."

Robert Frank in Sunday's NYT:

Does money buy happiness? This week, Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, will join a long line of people who have taken serious stabs at trying to answer that thorny question. He will hold a hearing exploring whether traditional economic measures like per-capita income accurately capture people’s sense of well-being.

This has long been a contested issue. Although everyone concedes that income is an imperfect welfare measure, conservative economists have tended to emphasize its virtues while liberals have been more likely to stress its shortcomings.

The debate is not just of philosophical interest; it also has important policy implications. Recent research findings offer support for specific arguments on both sides. Mounting evidence suggests, however, that per-capita income is a less reliable measure of well-being when income inequality has been rising rapidly, as it has in recent decades.

....

[a] problem ... that challenges the very foundation of the presumed link between per-capita G.D.P. and economic welfare ... [is] the assumption, traditional in economic models, that absolute income levels are the primary determinant of individual well-being.

This assumption is contradicted by consistent survey findings that when everyone’s income grows at about the same rate, average levels of happiness remain the same. Yet at any given moment, the pattern is that wealthy people are happier, on average, than poor people. Together, these findings suggest that relative income is a much better predictor of well-being than absolute income.

....

That per-capita G.D.P. is an imperfect index of economic welfare is not news. The lesson of recent work is that its weaknesses are more serious than we previously realized.

And it is an especially uninformative metric when income inequality has been rising sharply, as it has been in recent decades. A society that aspires to improve needs a better measure of what counts as progress.

The hearing Frank mentions is Wednesday at 1:30. For testimony, check out the committee's site later this week.

Lane Kenworthy is the latest to chime in on the problems with the argument by Cox and Alm that inequality is best measured with consumption data. In addition to noting the problems with the consumer expenditure survey, he makes this important point about assets and wealth:

There is a more fundamental problem with Cox and Alm’s argument. I agree that it is helpful to consider consumption in addition to income, but the point applies more to our assessment of poverty (on which Mark Thoma has helpful discussion and links) than to our assessment of inequality. After all, the portion of their income that high earners don’t spend gets saved. It is therefore available for later spending. And income saved becomes an asset that provides financial and psychological security.

While there is less inequality of consumption than of income, the flip side — because those with high incomes are able to save and invest much more — is that inequality of wealth is much greater than inequality of income. The following chart shows the shares of income and wealth of the bottom two quintiles (fifths) and the top three quintiles of households in 2004 (the most recent year for which wealth data are available). The calculations are by Edward Wolff (here), using data from the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances. The bottom two fifths of households have just 0.2% of the total household wealth. The top fifth have 85%.

The Demos report I cited earlier provides further evidence on how even many families with middle-class incomes don't have the assets they need for economic security. Among their findings:

About four out of five middle-class families do not have sufficient assets to cover three-quarters of essential living expenses for even three months should their source of income disappear. We defined essential living expenses as food, housing, clothing, transportation, health care, personal care, education, personal insurance and pensions.

In a post on the Cox-Alm inequality op-ed, Mark Thoma ends with a good summary of why poverty involves more than the lack of shelter and food:

To me, being poor isn't just about stuff, it's about being able to participate fully in society. The things on the list that almost all households now have, refrigerators, stoves, TVs, and telephones, are things you have to have to function in this society (the other things on the list such as VCRs and DVDs only have 80% penetration so they don't necessarily reach the poor). How do you make a doctor's appointment without a phone? Drop by in you spare time? A refrigerator and a stove are items a household has to have given how we bring food to the table in this society. I just don't see these things as doing anything more than providing the minimum necessary to function. Even something like a TV is necessary if you want to, say, keep up with the political debates (there's a presumption in our political discourse that you can watch campaigns on television and they are largely devoted to delivery over that medium - without a TV you cannot participate fully) or even talk to people around the water-cooler at work about the latest popular TV show.

Yes, the poor might have been well-off in, say, 1821 given the societal standards of the time, or some other historical period one might choose to compare, but this isn't 1821 - things have changed and so have the minimum standards necessary to be part of the society. I'm sorry if there are people who don't want to share, an indication that even with all their wealth they don't think they have enough (if they did, why balk at sharing with the less fortunate, people who, according to the Cox and Alm article, are "drawing down ... bank accounts" and selling other assets like cars just to keep up?). Giving people the things they need to be a full part of the society they live in is the decent and right thing to do. As our society elevates itself and the requirements for full participation increase, when things like computers are as necessary as a stove, our standards of decency - what we are willing to accept as a minimum standard of living - must also rise. Just meeting physical needs - food and clothing - is not enough to be a full part of the society we live in today. We can and should do better than that.

In Sunday's NYT, W. Michael Cox and Richard Alm are allowed to make the novel (and wrong) argument that inequality is best measured using consumption data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, and that when inequality is measured the way they say it should be, America is—surprise!—a model of egalitarianism. You may remember Cox-Alm from their earlier (and just as erroneous) work on income mobility in which they discovered that America is—surprise!—a model of egalitarianism ... but only if you incorrectly measure income mobility to make the numbers come out that way.

Dean Baker, Paul Krugman and others waste no time in dismantling the new Cox-Alm illusionism.

Here's Dean:

I won't go through all the problems in Cox's analysis (there are many). I will just point out that the data set that he uses, the consumer expenditure survey (CEX) is not very well-suited for this sort of analysis.

The CEX misses a great deal of consumption. This can readily be seen by simply looking at the aggregate statistics. The average after-tax income reported in the survey is $58,101. Average consumption expenditures are $48,398. This implies a savings rate of 16.7 percent. The National Income and Product Accounts data show a savings rate of less than 1 percent. This suggests that the CEX is missing a great deal of consumer expenditures, which makes this sort of analysis very dubious.

While it isn't particularly suited to measuring inequality, CEX data, combined with income data, is arguably more useful in assessing the economic security of middle class families. In a recent report, Demos and Thomas Shapiro at Brandeis University use CEX data to construct a middle class economic security index. Among their findings, "only 31 percent of middle-income families match our profile for being securely middle class. That is, despite falling into the broad range that defines middle-class "income," fewer than one in three families has the necessary combination of other factors to ensure middle-class security."

In his book The Great Risk Shift, Yale political scientist documented an increase in the volatility of household income. Recent CBO research finds considerable earnings volatility (although no increase over time), and lower levels of household income volatility (again, with no increase over time). Hacker has posted a lengthy response on his web site. Of particular note, is this synthesis of recent research on volatility:

Indeed, it is possible to sum up the findings of the existing studies, including my analyses in The Great Risk Shift and the work with Elisabeth Jacobs reported in our forthcoming EPI brief, in a series of fairly simple observations:

The instability of family incomes has risen substantially over the last three decades. Much of the rise in income volatility occurred prior to 1985, and volatility dropped substantially in the late 1990s. But it has risen in recent years to exceed its 1980s peak.

The proportion of working-age individuals experiencing a large drop in their family income (50 percent or greater) has climbed more steadily, rising (in our analyses) from around 3 to 4 percent in the early 1970s to roughly 7 to 9 percent in the early 2000s. The probability of large income drops varies predictably with the business cycle. Yet it has also trended strongly upward over time. For instance, the 2001 recession, which was fairly mild in macroeconomic terms, was associated with a higher chance of large income drops than the recession of the early 1980s.

There is an important distinction between family income (total earnings, asset income, and transfer income for all members of a family) and individual earnings. While the instability of individual workers’ earnings rose sharply between the 1970s and 1980s, it has been more or less stable since then, trending up and down with the business cycle through the 1980s and 1990s. However, individual workers’ earnings instability appears to have risen in the early 2000s. This basic trend—a rise in earnings variability in the 1970s, little clear trend from the early 1980s to the late 1990s, and an upswing in the early 2000s—has been confirmed by numerous analyses, including a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office. Moreover, this same basic pattern can be seen in data from both the survey-based Panel Study of Income Dynamics (which we use in this brief) and the administratively-collected Continuous Work History Sample of the Social Security Administration (used by the CBO).

Contrary to assertions in the popular press, women’s increased workforce participation has not been a major factor contributing to the rise in family income volatility. Female earnings have, if anything, become somewhat more stable since the 1980s. Male workers have experienced a larger and more sustained rise in earnings instability. And because men’s earnings account for a larger percentage of total household income than do women’s earnings, on average, rising instability in male earnings helps account for the increase in family income volatility. In short, the stabilizing influence on family income of the decrease in female earnings instability is overwhelmed by the rise in men’s earnings instability.

In addition to the increase in male earnings variability, other likely causes of rising family income volatility include the growing variability of cash transfers and the limited cushioning effect of having a second earner in the household. Although the evidence is limited, early analyses suggest that a second family earner is less of a benefit in terms of income protection today than it was prior to the 1990s.

Finally, while less educated and poorer Americans have less stable family incomes than their better-educated and wealthier peers, the increase in family income volatility appears to have affected all major demographic and economic groups—and, indeed, looks most sharp among college-educated Americans in recent years.

Pew's Economic Mobility Project released three new reports today focused respectively on intergenerational mobility, mobility by gender, and mobility by race. Income mobility data is complex and often presented confusingly, but the initial report on intergenerational mobility does a good job of coming up with new typologies and ways of presenting the data. Here's one example, which classifies Americans into categories based on income change and movement across quintiles:

"Upwardly mobile"—One third (34 percent) of Americans are "upwardly mobile," surpassing their parents' income and their parents' economic ranking (by one or more quintiles). This means that of the 67 percent of families who make more money than their parents, only half move ahead enough to place them in a new position on the income ladder.

"Riding the tide"—About one quarter (27 percent) are "riding the tide", making more than their parents', but remaining in the same economic position as their parents.

"Falling despite the tide"—A small group of individuals (5 percent) surpass their parents' income, yet fall behind their parents in economic standing, and are "falling despite the tide."

"Downwardly mobile"—Another third of Americans (33 percent) are "downwardly mobile," making less than their parents and failing to rise above their parents' economic position.

And, here's a graph showing intergenerational mobility:

One thing to note about this graph, it helps illustrate the point I've made before that poverty isn't simply or even mostly a matter of children who grew up in poverty remaining in it as adults (the opposite claim is a common feature of culture of poverty arguments, both conservative and liberal ones, that point to single parenthood and lack of a willingness to work as the primary drivers of poverty). While kids who grow up in poverty are more likely to experience it as adults than other income groups, most adults (58%) experiencing poverty grew up in higher income groups. The issue is less a culture of poverty limited to some very small "underclass", than an economy that fails to deliver on the American promise of fairness, opportunity and mobility for a considerable number of us.

I'm lifting up a good comment on my earlier post noting Heather Boushey's take on the most recent income and health insurance numbers from the Census Bureau:

First, it's important to recognize that the top quintile has so much more income than the bottom 2 or 3 quintiles that a 1% bump for them can, in dollar terms, easily offset a 3-5% drop for everyone else. It's also important to recognize that the share of economic growth going to personal income has gone down - so the total size of the pie being divvied up among the five income quintiles hasn't grown as much as the economy during this recovery.

One major beneficiary, apart from the income accounts represented in the chart, has been corporate earnings. I haven't looked at this in a while, but if memory serves, based on data from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the current recovery has seen an unprecedentedly large share of the growth in national income go to retained corporate earnings. While corporate earnings accounts on average for something like 10% of GDP, i recollect that the growth in corporate earnings from 2001 through 2005 accounted for nearly half of all GDP growth. That's growth in the national income that's not making it into the pockets of any individual family (although it can and does increase the wealth of families who own a lot of corporate stock). And because businesses are using a lot of that income to buy up their own stock (to artificially shore up the price) and to buy other companies (in order to milk them for more profits rather than to expand them), the indirect "trickle down" effects have been much smaller than in past recoveries, as well. Put all of that together with the fact that the distribution of personal income has been skewed dramatically in favor of people at the very top of the scale, and we get the kind of phantom economic growth we're seeing now, where the economy's growing but almost nobody's seeing the benefits.

When the Census Bureau released income and health insurance numbers for 2006 last week, most of the immediate focus was on the change from 2005 to 2006. But the more interesting story involves longer-term trends, particularly the trends since the beginning, in mid-2001, of the recovery from the last recession. CEPR's Heather Boushey has an excellent piece that reviews these trends:

... despite the fact that the median household saw its income grow by 0.7 percent between 2005 to 2006, it remained 2.0 percent below where it had been in 2000, at the last economic peak. So far, this recovery has generated less income growth than prior ones: at this point in the recovery of the 1990s, household income was only 1.3 percent below its prerecession peak and at the comparable point in 1980s, household income was only 0.9 percent below its prerecession peak.

And what growth we have seen in family income has gone mostly to those at the very top of the income distribution. Since 2000, families in the top fifth of the economic ladder have seen their income rise by 1.0 percent -- they were the only ones to see any growth at all -- while those in the bottom fifth saw theirs fall by 4.5 percent.

What's more, it's been more work, not rising earnings, that have pushed incomes up at all. From 2005 to 2006, median full-time earnings fell for both male and female workers by over a percent (1.1 percent for men and 1.2 percent for women). This is the third year in a row that median earnings have fallen. Employment rates are higher for both men and women, indicating that families are coping with lower earnings by simply working more. All of this is not very good news. By these measures, the current recovery has been inadequate for millions of families. It also indicates that the data for 2007 may not be that much better. In 2006, hourly wages increased sharply in the last half of the year and, as a result, 2006 was the first year in three years to show growth in inflation-adjusted weekly earnings. While inflation-adjusted hourly wages fell in early 2007, they are now growing but at a slower pace than in late 2006.

But wages and incomes are not the whole story. As we've moved through this economic recovery, access to health insurance has become increasingly a tale of the haves and the have-nots. Between 2000 and 2006, the share of people with employment-based health insurance has fallen from 64.2 to 59.7 percent, and the share without health insurance is now at 15.8 percent, an all-time high

.....

In a new working paper, economists Wojciech Kopczuk of Columbia, Emmanuel Saez of UC Berkeley and Jae Song of the Social Security Administration use Social Security earnings administration data to track income and mobility trends in the United States since 1937. Among their conclusions: overall mobility is relatively stable, but there are major differences by gender, with inequality and mobility worsening among men since the 1950s.

Here's the time-series they construct for earnings shares:

And the conclusion section of the paper:

Our paper has used U.S. Social Security earnings administrative data to construct series of inequality and mobility in the United States since 1937. The analysis of these data has allowed us to start exploring the evolution of mobility and inequality over a full career as well as complement the more standard analysis of annual inequality and short term mobility in several ways. We found that changes in mobility have not substantially affected the evolution of inequality, so that annual snapshots of the distribution provide a good approximation of the evolution of the longer term measures of inequality.

However, our key finding is that while the overall measures of mobility are fairly stable, they hide heterogeneity by gender groups. Inequality and opportunity among male workers has worsened along almost any dimension since the 1950s: our series display sharp increases in annual earnings inequality, slight reductions in short-term mobility, large increases in long- term career wide inequality with slight reduction or stability of long-term mobility. Against those developments stand the very large earning gains achieved by women since the 1950s, due to increases in labor force attachment as well as increases in earnings conditional on working. Those gains have been so great that they more than compensate for the increase in inequality for males when focusing on the bottom of the distribution.

Thus, the weakening of social norms and labor market institutions inherited from the post- war years which favored low skilled white male workers59 at the expense of women, Blacks, and top talent has had two important and conflicting consequences for earnings inequality in recent decades. It has allowed women to close a large part of the gender gap, hence improving the position of low earners (especially from a lifetime and upward mobility perspective). However, it may have also strengthened pure market forces which have contributed to increasing sharply the pay of top earners in the US economy.

We would like to develop the present analysis in several ways in future work. First, we plan on investigating in more detail the mechanisms of the surge in top earnings using employee- employer data. This will allow us to examine the industrial composition of top earnings and its evolution. We will also be able to analyze the evolution of the labor market for top earners (such as tenure, turn-over, and earnings changes within jobs and across jobs). Second, our analysis has remained largely descriptive without trying to test formally specific hypotheses or decompose patterns into various factors. Even though the administrative SSA data have relatively few covariates, it should be possible to expand the analysis in that direction.

More importantly, our analysis has lead us to assemble various SSA data that had not been systematically used for research purposes previously. We hope that our broad analysis of inequality and mobility, as well as the new opportunities for joint research pro jects between SSA and outside academic researchers, will encourage further research with these extraordinary SSA earnings data which can cast new light on many different aspects of labor economics in the United States.

A new report from the Pew Economic Mobility Project makes this claim:

... the American engine of economic assimilation ... is incorporating a fundamentally different and larger pool of immigrants than it did in earlier generations.

The claim that the United States is "incorporating a ... larger pool of immigrants that it did in earlier generations" is only true if one defines "earlier generations" restrictively and by "larger pool" means the number of immigrants rather than the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. population.

On the definition of "earlier generations", the key question is whether one limits the comparison to immigrants who came to the United States roughly between the National Origins Act of 1924—an Act designed to limit immigration to "desirable" Western European immigrants by imposing national origin quotas on immigration—and the Immigration Act of 1965, which reformed the quota system to make it less discriminatory, or do those earlier generations include the period before 1924? The Pew paper includes no data from periods prior to 1940, so it's adopting a restrictive definition of earlier generations.

This restrictive definition matters because the percentage of immigrants in the U.S. population was larger in most of the pre-1924 period than it is today. As the U.S. population has increased, the number of immigrants has also increased, except for the period between the 1924 and 1965 Acts when it declined.

At a minimum, a document produced by a project that purports to "broaden the current, sometimes politicized, debate over income inequality to achieve greater consensus about the state of economic mobility in America" should avoid presenting data in ways that narrow, politicize, and, uh, disconsensify the debate by failing to do something as simple as providing the whole picture for the 20th century as well as the relevant historical context. But by excluding the historical data from the period before the 1924 immigration law went into effect (and not explaining that the 1924 law is now widely viewed as racially motivated)¹ and not putting immigration trend numbers into the context of the overall U.S. population, the report narrows debate and avoids consensus.

As additional context it also would have been helpful to compare the U.S. immigration rate to those of other well-off nations. Conventional wisdom has it that the United States is an outlier compared to other nations, but increased migration is a global trend. Immigrants comprise more than 15 percent of the population in more than 50 countries (by comparison they're around 11 percent in the US according to the 2000 Census) and account for large proportions of population and employment growth in most developed countries.

If the Pew Mobility Project had wanted to produce a balanced report on immigration, it would have been smart to 1) not have a partisan in the immigration debate be the sole author of the report (the author is a nice partisan for a conservative, but a partisan nonetheless, for an example of a more balanced report that involved partisans from differing camps, rather than just a single representative of one, see this one); 2) have a balanced group of immigration researchers involved as reviewers/commenters on the publication. Only one of the researchers listed in the report's acknowledgments, the controversial George Borjas, a favorite academic of the anti-immigration camp, actually specializes in the field of immigration. Among the obvious choices to balance the influence of Borjas, those prominent researchers who either specialize in immigration or have produced key immigration-related research include: Alejandro Portes, David Card, Donald Hernandez, Audrey Singer (the immigration specialist at Brookings, who oddly doesn't appear to have been consulted at all, even though the author of the Pew Report is also at Brookings), Jeff Passel, Michael Fix, Richard Alba, etc.

The problem here isn't that the Pew immigration report falls outside of the standards of the kind of research advocacy literature that organizations taking sides in policy debates produce. It's of the same quality as research advocacy literature produced by the Heritage Foundation, CBPP, or Brookings. Rather, it's that the Pew Mobility Project says that it's holding itself to a higher standard, and that's a standard that this publication fails to meet. So, either they should change the publication, or change the standard they say they're holding themselves to. Personally, I'd be fine with the latter.

I'll take on the second half of the claim, that today's immigrants' are "fundamentally different"—a claim commonly made in regards to Jewish, Italian, and other southern and eastern European immigrants in earlier periods of our nation's history—later in Part 2 of my reponse.