Conventional approaches define income poverty as a binary status, implying that being poor or nonpoor is equivalent across groups. The authors propose a novel visualization that moves beyond head count rates to display group-specific income distributions relative to the poverty threshold, simultaneously illustrating poverty prevalence, poverty gaps, and what the authors term poverty buffers: the distance above the threshold capturing income security. The authors apply this approach to all children aged 0 to 18 years in Sweden in 2022, by mother’s country of birth. The visualization reveals three patterns obscured by standard indicators. First, head count poverty rates vary dramatically, from 8 percent to 77 percent across groups. Second, average poverty gaps are surprisingly similar despite vast differences in prevalence, reflecting stark stratification by parental migration background. Third, poverty buffers reveal cumulative advantage: lower poverty rates coincide with substantially greater income security. By rendering gaps, buffers, and full distributions in a single figure, this visualization exposes dimensions of inequality that no single poverty measure captures alone.

Overqualification is one of the key labor market disadvantages that the children of immigrants born in the host society—the second-generation (G2)—disproportionately experience compared to the majority population. A higher prevalence of overqualification among the G2 may result from their strategic choice to circumvent persistent unemployment but also from the use of overqualification as a stepping stone into adequate employment —as predicted by career mobility theory. In light of this consideration, our paper investigates 1) to what extent overqualification and unemployment differently lead to career progression into adequately matched employment and 2) how this varies between the second-generation and majority populations. This study draws on Swedish register data on the total population and applies dynamic correlated random-effects multinomial logistic models to investigate year-to-year transitions across labor market states. Our results show that the chances of moving to adequate employment are higher for unemployed individuals than for overqualified workers. This result, which holds for both the majority population and G2 groups, is against the idea that overqualification serves as a stepping stone. We find that the chances of transitioning from overqualification and unemployment to adequate employment are higher for the majority population compared to most G2 groups. Although not the main focus of this paper, our analysis also provides evidence of higher risks for G2 overqualified workers to become unemployed and for G2 unemployed individuals to remain entrapped in unemployment. Together, these findings indicate a vicious cycle of career disadvantages for the G2.

This brief report delves into the poverty dynamics of second-generation immigrant (G2) children in Sweden and Finland, comparing them with their peers from the majority population. These are unique contexts to examine such socioeconomic inequalities since they are the two highest ranked countries in terms of the Migrant Integration Policy Index. This study draws on longitudinal full-population register data from 2011–2019 for children aged 0–4. This study contributes to existing research by providing a detailed, up-to-date analysis of socioeconomic disparities between a wide range of second-generation immigrant groups and majority children during early childhood—a period widely recognized as critical for development and strongly influenced by work-family reconciliation and family welfare policies. Findings reveal significant inequalities with G2 children facing longer exposure to poverty, higher poverty persistence and higher poverty entry rates than majority children. Interestingly, the G2’s longer exposure to poverty is not due to a higher likelihood of remaining poor, but rather a greater risk of falling into poverty. The study underscores the severe poverty levels among some immigrant groups, G2 Somalis being the chief example, as a critical challenge to equality and social stability in both countries.