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Kevin Zhou
Ms. Thompson
AP Lang, Block 2, Skinny A
February 25th, 2015
Draft 2
The Causes of Poverty in America
Oftentimes people in poverty are looked upon with disdain, as though their plight was
caused by a fundamental flaw in their abilities which prevents them from succeeding
economically. What many people fail to realize is that those in poverty are often trapped there
with no way of escaping. Poverty is caused by many factors, many of which are outside the
control of the poor. These include the rampant illegal immigration found nowadays, the
standards of modern day American society, and the classic poverty trap (Abramsky 12). Each of
the factors makes it harder for those in poverty to escape.
Perhaps the most well-known reason as to why the poor are impinged from moving up in
society is the poverty trap. A poverty trap is a self-reinforcing mechanism or process that keeps
the poor in poverty ("An Assessment of the Accuracy of NPRs Native Foster Care: Lost
Children, Shattered Families"). In America, the prime example would be minority groups living
poor socioeconomic situations. These people live in extremely poor neighborhoods, where
everyone lives in poverty, making it a common thing to see poor people in these areas. These

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districts often have an extremely poor schooling system, which means that the children who live
in these poor neighborhoods grow up without a proper education or with extreme apathy towards
education itself (Danziger). These people then grow up to inevitably living in the same poor
neighborhoods due to their lack of an education which would allow them to escape poverty, and
their children will then grow up in the same poor district with the failing educational system. In
this way, the cycle proliferates. The only way to end such poverty traps is to provide aid in the
form of capital and job employment opportunities. However, this requires the initiative of those
outside the poverty line, namely the rich and white folk. But once the proper aid is provided,
those in poverty will no longer be impeded and the will be able to pull themselves out of the
poverty trap (Abramsky 45).
Many people fail to realize that much of the population growth in the United States of
America, which is a first world country, is due to prodigious immigration and not from a high
birth rate. Much of the immigration seen nowadays is illegal, and these immigrants come from
mainly Mexico ("An Assessment of the Accuracy of NPRs Native Foster Care: Lost Children,
Shattered Families"). These illegal immigrants coming from Mexico are always unskilled
laborers who can only take low income jobs in order to support their family to try and send their
kids to school so they can get out of the aforementioned poverty trap. However, by doing this,
these immigrants take many of the jobs that legal citizens living under the poverty line need
(Poor Us: An Animated History of Poverty--Why Poverty?). By creating this competition, illegal
immigrants not only ensure that true citizens of the USA are deprived of their jobs that they need,
but that more and more people are caught under the poverty line (Ehrenreich 65). This problem

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then just gets exponentially worse the more people there are and the more illegal immigrants we
receive. Having such a large population living under the poverty line also guarantees that low
income neighborhoods sprout up, which just furthers exacerbates the poverty problem and
impedes the progress of the poor, harming the efforts even more.
The third and perhaps the most potent of all the causes of poverty is the apprehension
towards the poor experienced by the society in which we live in. Our society nowadays no
longer has a sense of community. This is of course understandable; with the rise of Americas
population and big cities, it becomes increasingly difficult for a community to have just that, a
sense of community. This then results in those beneath the poverty line being largely overlooked
or ignored completely by the privileged ("Poverty in America"). This is a critical error, as the aid
of the rich is what is necessary for the poor to ascend out of poverty. If one is to look in the past,
they will see that some of the richest men in history have all been philanthropists, and through
their work, great deeds for the betterment of mankind have been achieved. From Carnegie to
Bill Gates, these venerated men set an example that all the wealthy should follow. If all the rich
were to put their efforts to aid the poor instead of lavishing in their opulent lifestyles, it could
just be enough for the poor to pull themselves out of poverty. However, since the wealthy and
influential are many times apathetic towards the plight of the poor, we cannot see the social
change that could be possible if the wealthy gave back more (Poor Us: An Animated History of
Poverty--Why Poverty?). Simply put, In order to fix this, a fundamental change in our societys
view towards the poor must be changed. ("An Assessment of the Accuracy of NPRs Native
Foster Care: Lost Children, Shattered Families").

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Those below the poverty line are more often than not born into poverty and due to these
many factors they remain below the poverty line, unable to escape their insipid life. The classic
poverty traps ensnares generations of families in poverty. The poverty trap is further enhanced
by the sheer volume of illegal immigration which damages our economy by creating too much
competition for jobs. Finally, the only way the poverty trap can be escaped is through financial
aid from the wealthy.