Our country is in desperate need of both foreign talent and more young workers.
The first is to keep us abreast of cutting edge technology and to encourage the work ethic associated with first and second generation arrivals.
The second because our population is aging and, unless we can entice younger workers to relocate to the USA over the next twenty years, there will not be sufficient tax revenue to support social security, Medicare and other benefits which we now provide to retirees.
Niall Ferguson published “The Ascent of Money, A Financial History of the World” in 2008, barely in time for him to make cursory reference to the Great Recession. Nevertheless, recession or not, the following remains as true today as it did then, perhaps even more so.
“Over the next forty years the share of the American population that is aged 65 or over is projected to rise from 12 percent to nearly 21 per cent…
“The average worker plans to work until age 65. But it turns out that he or she actually ends up retiring at 62; indeed, around four in ten American workers end up leaving the workforce earlier than they planned…
“Today (2007) the average retiree receives Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits totaling $21,000 a year. Multiply this by the current 3 million elderly and you see why these programme already consume such a large proportion of federal tax revenues. And that proportion is bound to rise, not only because the number of retirees is going p and because the costs of benefits like Medicare are out of control, rising at double the rate of inflation.”
“…the cost of Medicare alone will absorb 24 per cent of all federal income taxes by 2019.”
(NewsLanc editor: Hence the Affordable Care Act as an effort, so far very successful, to reign them in.)
“The Government Accountability Office’s latest estimate of implicit ‘exposures’ arising from unfunded future Social Security and Medicare benefits is $34 trillion. That is nearly four times the size of official federal debt.”
Yes, we need young people from Central America and Asia to spend some or all of their careers in the USA. It is either that or drastically reduce benefits for those who will retire a decade or more down the road.
A great irony is that as many Mexican immigrants return home each year as come to the USA. As the rest of the world progresses and the USA falls further behind in investments in infrastructure and education, we cease to be a magnet for immigrants.
A national policy based upon self interest would encourage, not discourage, immigration as was the case throughout our nation’s history until the late mid- twentieth century.
Like so many other things, we have it all wrong. As a country, we are guided by ignorance, prejudice and vapid ideological cant.
That is a much saner attitude toward immigrants than the prejudice that prevails.
Your last sentence applies to so many of the challenges we face today.
K. Z.
In my city much of the government subsidized housing is full of recent immigrants. While I don’t want them to be homeless it just seems that they are more of a burden than benefit when figuring what it is costing government to house them. We know the real reason for the calls for unrestricted immigration has more to do with keeping our out of control military over the million man mark so we can continue our empire of occupation, invasion, bombing, etc.