OSLO, March 7 (Xinhua) -- New data showed higher immigration implies a higher number of children living in families with persistent low income as immigrant families often have many children and few working adults, newspaper Aftenposten reported on Tuesday.
According to fresh numbers from Statistics Norway (SSB), in 2015 there were 38 percent of immigrant children in Norway who lived in families with so-called "persistent low income", while the share for non-immigrant children in similar situations was 5.4 percent.
In addition, there was a big difference among immigrant children from different countries.
Eight out of ten children of Somali origin belonged to a family with persistent low income in the years 2013-2015. For children with Syrian background, the rate was between six and seven out of ten.
This is followed by children with backgrounds from Iraq, Eritrea and Afghanistan. Over half of these children lived in families with persistent low income.
SSB uses the term "immigrant background" when a child either has personally immigrated to Norway or was born of immigrant parents.
Every Somali family with children consisted of 5.7 persons on average and had an average of one person working in 2015.
The corresponding figures for Norwegian families with no immigrant backgrounds were 4.1 persons and 1.9 persons working, the report said.
In the "good" end of the scale among immigrant children are those from Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sri Lanka, Philippines and Vietnam.
There were in total 98,200 children under 18 in Norway living in families with persistently low income in 2015. This is almost every tenth child in this age group, Aftenposten wrote.
The proportion has risen sharply in recent years. Only from 2011 to 2015, the share increased from 7.6 percent to 10 percent.
There have also been more children with ethnic Norwegian background in families with persistent low income. From 2011 to 2015, the number increased from barely 40,000 to 46,000.
