An October 2019 working paper finds that children of immigrants experience more upward economic mobility than children of U.S. citizens. The findings hold true even for children of low income immigrants.
(W)e find that immigrants at the bottom of the income distribution from nearly every sending country, including those with a sizable negative earnings gap in the first generation, have higher rates of upward mobility than the children of the US-born. This finding stands in contrast to the view that immigrants of certain countries of origin are not be able to integrate into the US economy.
The report, by economists from Princeton, Stanford, and U.C.-Davis, also finds that even though the countries from which immigrants arrive today differ from those of a century ago, the upward mobility of immigrant children remains consistent.
We find that, both historically and today, children of immigrants at the bottom of the income distribution have higher rates of upward mobility than children of the US-born and to a strikingly similar degree in each time period.
You can read the working paper here.