Common perceptions about the root of child poverty may soon shift since a recent study has shed new light on the issue.

The study, “How Much Does Change in the Proportion of Children Living in Immigrant Families Contribute to Change in the Poverty Rate among Children?” by Myungkook Joo, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Social Work was published in the Social Service Review September 2013.

In his research, Joo found that the increasing proportion of children in immigrant families do not play a large, determining role in changes in the child poverty rate.

“Using the data of 65,000 households from the annual Social and Economic Supplement to the Current Population Survey, my study sought to investigate whether fluctuations in the national child poverty rate were explained by changes in the share of children from immigrant families, Joo said.

In total, 260,205 children from 1993 to 2010 were studied, Joo said. He chose not to focus on any single population of immigrants to see if immigration as a whole caused changes in the child poverty rate.

Joo said he has been interested in social work with children from a very young age.

“In South Korea, I grew up with a family of social workers,” Joo said. “I lived with poor disadvantaged children, many of [whom] were abandoned at birth or given up by their biological parents.”

He said these intimate experiences in South Korea had left him gravitating toward the problems of child poverty, outcomes of the most disadvantaged children and most of all, social welfare policies and programs designed to serve impoverished children.

Recently, there have been talks about been the increase in immigration and its implications for child poverty in the political discussion throughout the U.S.

“The immigrant population nearly doubled in size to 38.1 million from 1990 to 2007,” Joo said. “During the same period, the number of immigrant families also doubled to 16.4 million, representing 82 percent of the total growth in the children’s population.”

Some scholars and the general public are worried that we have had an increasing population of poorly educated and unskilled immigrants in recent decades, Joo said.

“Few empirical studies have actually quantified the effects of this perceived large group of children from poor immigrants on the national child poverty rate,” he said.

Although children in noncitizen families made larger contributions to the child poverty rate than children in naturalized-citizen families, Joo said their influence was still relatively minor.

“Overall, my findings clarified that the blame on children from immigrant families for the high child poverty rate cannot be justified with evidence,” he said.

Some immigrants want to live in freedom, Joo said, and escape poverty and look for better opportunities for themselves and their children. The main reason they immigrate is employment opportunities, and many immigrants still believe this county offers a better life.

“The difference between media coverage and the empirical evidence of immigration on child poverty suggests that we tend to make conclusions based on personal experiences,” Joo said. “When we see a large number of poorly-educated immigrants with children who work at poorly-paid jobs in our daily lives, it is easy to relate them to child poverty.”

Because of economic conditions, parental employment and education, and family structure, children who grow up in poverty are likely to have poorer educational and labor market outcomes when they become an adult, Joo said.

Although it is fundamentally a parental responsibility to raise children to be productive adults, he said the government also has economic and social interests in investing in children’s long-term outcomes.

“The majority of children in immigrant families, including those in noncitizen families, are currently U.S. citizens by birth and are likely to remain in the country throughout their lives,” Joo said. “Investing in their human capital and economic outcomes should be an important national agenda.”

He said he plans to continue his research on poverty among children.

“In the future, I plan on researching the level of income volatility among low-income families and how it affects poor children’s outcomes” he said.

Danielle Chirico, development assistant at the Rutgers School of Social Work, said she and her colleagues were proud of Joo’s work.

“We at the Rutgers School of Social Work are very proud of Dr. Joo’s contribution to the Social Service Review,” she said. “The Social Service Review is a great outlet to disseminate knowledge to social workers, researchers, policy makers and the general public.”