Why is our child poverty rate so high?

Articles about America's high levels of child poverty are a media evergreen. Here's a typical entry, courtesy of the New York Times's Eduardo Porter: "The percentage of children who are poor is more than three times as high in the United States as it is in Norway or the Netherlands. America has a larger proportion of poor children than Russia." That's right: Russia.

Outrageous as they seem, the assertions are true - at least in the sense that they line up with official statistics. Comparisons of the sort that Porter makes, though, should be accompanied by an asterisk pointing to a very American reality. Before Europe's recent migration crisis, the United States was the only developed country to routinely import millions of poor, low-skilled families, from some of the most destitute places