Beyond the Poverty Line: Income Distributions and Poverty Dynamics Among Children of Immigrants in Sweden

• In Event: Children and Youth Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 5: Migration, Mobility, and Navigating State Systems

Abstract

Standard poverty measures — anchored in binary headcount rates — systematically understate group differences in children’s living conditions. This paper argues that a complete account of child poverty among the second generation (G2) requires attending to the full income distribution around the poverty threshold: how far poor families fall below the line (poverty gaps), how much income security non-poor families hold above it (poverty buffers), and how families move in and out of poverty over time. Using full-population Swedish register data, we combine a longitudinal analysis of poverty dynamics across early childhood (ages 0–4; N = 563,404 children born 2011–2015) with a novel distributional visualization of group-specific income positions relative to the poverty threshold for all children aged 0–18 in 2022. Sweden’s status as a global leader in family and immigrant integration policy (MIPEX) makes observed inequalities a likely lower bound for comparable societies. The longitudinal results reveal extreme polarization in chronic poverty: while 3.7% of majority children are poor in all five years of early childhood, this figure reaches 60% for children of Somali origin. Critically, the primary driver of chronic poverty among G2 children is not an inability to escape poverty but an extreme vulnerability to falling into it — non-poor Somali-origin children face a poverty entry rate of 26.9%, compared to 3.2% for majority children. The distributional analysis explains why: high-poverty groups have not only larger poverty gaps but dramatically smaller poverty buffers, meaning their non-poor members sit perilously close to the threshold. Even modest income shocks — driven by labor market precarity, temporary contracts, and seniority-based layoff rules — are sufficient to push these families into poverty. Together, these findings reveal a pattern of cumulative distributional inequality that headcount rates alone cannot capture, and point to the need for preventive rather than remedial policy responses.

Authors

• Siddartha Aradhya, Stockholm University

• Raffaele Grotti, University of Trento, Italy

• Rense Nieuwenhuis, Stockholm University