The USA had over 700,000 new citizens naturalized last year, and that doesn't include the hundreds of thousands that risk their lives every year to come here illegally. What do they have going for them that our home grown poor don't have? I taught at risk kids for over 20 years, and I had students that wouldn't wear their glasses in school because...? Those kids never learned how to use a tape measure or add fractions, thus making high paying jobs like in the building trades impossible to get. Stuff like that, and like crack, are a one way road to poverty.

The fifties were a boom time for the simple reason that the industrial world outside of the USA had been bombed flat. And then we helped them to rebuild all of that and we had to compete with them again. See The Rust Belt for what happened next.