A Key Fact the Current Illegal Immigration Debate Overlooks

(Orig­i­nally printed in Trista Harris’s blog about phil­an­thropy: New Voices of Phil­an­thropy)

Lost amidst the hub­bub about Arizona’s recent leg­is­la­tion to crack down on ille­gal immi­gra­tion, is the sim­ple fact that most baby boomers, approx­i­mately one-​​third of America’s labor force, will reach the retire­ment age of 65 dur­ing the next two decades.

Leave aside, for a moment, the argu­ments about the legit­i­macy of being a legal cit­i­zen and human rights. Our coun­try isn’t pro­duc­ing enough new work­ers to replace those who retire: accord­ing to the US Cen­sus Bureau there are about 77 mil­lion baby boomers and only 46 mil­lion peo­ple in gen­er­a­tion X and gen­er­a­tion Y.

Where will the new work­ers come from? It’s immi­gra­tion, or else a mirac­u­lous break­through in robot­ics engineering.

In 2008, the first of the baby boomers hit the age of 62, which is sig­nif­i­cant because it’s the age that the aver­age worker retires. Although baby boomers will likely work longer than pre­dicted because of extended life expectan­cies and over-​​extended retire­ment plans, health con­di­tions and the effects of old age will pre­vent many from work­ing full-​​time into their 70s and force oth­ers to retire much earlier.

By 2020, if not sooner, we’ll be com­pet­ing with coun­tries in West­ern Europe, Japan, and else­where in the world to attract immi­grants. If we’re unsuc­cess­ful, much could change for the worse for our economies and in our lives:

• Of course, annual increases in social secu­rity, Med­ic­aid, Medicare, and insur­ance pay­outs are already steep, and they will steepen even more sharply in the com­ing years.
• Home val­ues may once again decline because many Baby Boomers will need to sell or down­size to cover their retire­ment expenses.
• For the same rea­son, sav­ings rates are also likely to shrink because Baby Boomers will be cash­ing out their stocks and IRAs and won’t be earn­ing enough new income to con­tinue their cur­rent rate of savings.
• Accordingly, interest rates would need to rise to encour­age more sav­ings. This could trig­ger a return of run­away inflation.
• Taxes are also likely to rise to pay for the needs of an aging pop­u­la­tion. This could also trig­ger more inflation.
• Employ­ers will need to pay higher salaries as they com­pete for a dwin­dling sup­ply of work­ers, espe­cially for ser­vices that cater to seniors, like health care. The added infla­tion­ary pres­sure will likely cause the price of goods and ser­vices to rise.

Sound far­fetched?

Not at all, accord­ing to fore­casts from lead­ing polit­i­cal sci­en­tists and econ­o­mists, such as those printed in recent books from George Fried­man and Jacques Attali, and from national and state demog­ra­phers, such as Min­nesota State Demog­ra­pher Tom Gillaspy. In fact, the above sce­nario might be an under­state­ment. Some observers expect a return to the stagfla­tion that crip­pled the econ­omy in the late 70s and early 80s, but for a more extended period of time.

One effec­tive response that polit­i­cal sci­en­tists, econ­o­mists, and demog­ra­phers all agree on is to attract more, more, and more immi­grant labor.

Immi­grants can pro­vide the spe­cial­ized skills we need to replace retir­ing engi­neers and researchers, exec­u­tives and man­agers. They can fill vacant posi­tions for doc­tors, nurses, and aides in health care facil­i­ties and nurs­ing homes. They can also pro­vide the man­ual labor needed to har­vest the fields and oper­ate factories.

Like it or not, within the next 10 years we’ll not only be beg­ging immi­grants, legal and pos­si­bly ille­gal, to stay, we’ll be beg­ging them to live here and help us keep the country’s econ­omy afloat.

If we keep pass­ing laws like Arizona’s, what kind mes­sage will this send?

Could it add up to a record of hos­til­ity that causes work­ers we need from India, from East­ern Europe, from Latin Amer­ica, and from else­where to ignore the call to help us prop up our econ­omy when it begins to sag beneath the sheer num­ber of retir­ing Baby Boomers a few years from now?

Tagged as: Aging, Future workforce, Immigration, Social Justice, The Economy