The Buchananite forces over at The New York Times want to blame immigrants for “the surprising drop in median income in New York City that has puzzled demographers studying the results of the 2000 census.” That is the gist of a news article that ran atop the front page of yesterday’s Times under the headline “Immigration Cut Into Income in New York, Census Finds.” Census data, the Times claims, show that median household incomes dropped “in much of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens, often in neighborhoods like Jackson Heights and eastern Flushing, where longtime residents have moved out and been replaced by immigrants.”

The Times analysis is so simplistic as to be foolish. The headline and the lead of the article make it sound as though the presence of immigrants is actually hurting someone. In fact, there’s nothing in the Census that indicates that any individual’s income has been hurt by the presence in the city of more immigrants. To do that would require a longitudinal study that tracks individuals over time. The census doesn’t track individuals over time; it tracks geographical areas over time. To compare median incomes between 1990 and 2000 — when in 1990 the city’s population was 7,322,564 and in 2000 it was 8,008,278 different people — isn’t that meaningful to begin with. A more accurate headline would be “Immigrants Contribute to Rise in Total Income in New York.”

It looks to us like what happened over the period between 1990 and 2000 is that some wealthy people moved out of some of the city’s neighborhoods and retired to Florida or New Jersey. Others stayed put. For the most part, all those people were better off financially in 2000 than they were in 1990. In the meantime, there was an influx of immigrants from poorer countries who, like immigrants to this country dating back to the Mayflower and through Ellis Island, came here seeking opportunity and freedom. Those people are mostly better off than they were in the countries they came from. And we are all better off for having their services and their entrepreneurial energy as part of our economy.

In a few decades, those new immigrants will be moving out of their current neighborhoods into more prosperous ones. They will be replaced by poorer, more recently arrived immigrants. And if the Times still hasn’t wised up, we’re likely to see another headline like “Census Finds Immigrants Lower City’s Income Data” to inspire the latest generation of know-nothings.