After the fall of the Soviet Union, Israel witnessed large waves of immigration. This study examines the effect of age at migration on poverty among these post-1990 immigrants. Migrants arriving as children or adolescence are less likely to experience poverty as adults than people arriving at older ages because they acquired their education in the host country, they are proficient in the host language and culture and they have strong local social networks that can help secure employment. Working-aged immigrants typically interrupt their employment and must start again in a new labor market, therefore they are more likely to encounter economic hardship than immigrants who arrived as children. Immigrants arriving at older ages may encounter severe difficulties in finding employment. They also have fewer years to accumulate market experience in the new country and to accrue pension benefits. Consequently, they have lower levels of benefits upon retirement and are at risk of experiencing poverty and economic hardship. Most vulnerable are those who migrate at an older age from countries in which they either did not accumulate retirement benefits or could not transfer them to the host country.

This study uses the "New Immigrant Survey 2010-2011" (n=3952), conducted by Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics and matched with the 2008 census. This survey is a representative sample of immigrants aged 27-75 who arrived to Israel between 1990 and 2007.

Our findings reveal an effect of age at migration. Those arriving after age fifty have higher odds of being in poverty than those migrating at younger ages, even after controlling for country of origin, education and labor market participation, as well as gender and marital status. Language proficiency and social networks also affect the odds of being in poverty, but these effects do not differ by age at migration.