Thread: Marcela Sanchez: Washington Post -

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01942.html

She says we have to welcome immigrants (legal or otherwise..) because we have an aging population.

GASP the horror - (Sarcasm)

If we reduced government socialism/welfare this wouldnt be a problem. Under our current system this "fix" of letting more immigrants would only work for 30 years, then you'd need more people.

All the while ignoring the costs of a rising (spiraling) population due solely to immigration that will impact this country and the world due to material usage.

America and other civilized nations have recognized that we need to stop world population growth to have a sustainable earth - if we keep letting all these immigrants in, it will just encourage population growth here and in the countries these immigrants come from.

IMO we need to deal with the retiring babyboomers by learning to live with less.

Immigrants are not the answer Ms. Sanchez - they are the problem.

As a baby boomer, I want to keep working and being productive. This generation is different than the ones before, as many of us are not following the traditional aging patterns of previous generations. Why not deal with the potential drain on society by baby boomers by not forcing them out of work while they are still productive? This will require much more rigorous enforcement of anti age discrimination laws.

Or we could import a bunch of 20 something workers and in 30 or more years we will have .... Everyone do the math here.

The baby boom was a big "lump" in the demographics that some compare to a "pig in a python". Unless we want to permanently sustain America at that population level, the "pig" needs to work its way through, then America can stabilize at a lower population with more room and opportunity for all.

People generally wait to have children until their income can provide a standard of living comprable to what they themselves grew up with. As more immigrants come in to the United States their competition drives down the level of compensation for jobs at their skill level. This means Americans with that skill level delay having children while incoming Third World immigrants enjoy higher standards of living than they had experienced in their home countries even at wages undercutting the Americans. Then on top of that is that all of these households are eligible for government assistance so that the children are funded out of the tax money paid by families whose own fertility has declined. Of the immigrants some are here under the allowances set up by American citizens for new immigrants. We can not complain effectively about immigrants within the law. Others however have not bothered to abide by our immigration laws. These depending on your use of words are illegal aliens, unauthorized and undocumented.

Hey, if Americans think a 74-year-old can be President, then our so-called "aging" population should be good and productive for quite a number of years yet!

37% of the foreign born are on Medicaid, so tell me how more immigrants especially illegals are going to contribute ANYTHING. When you factor all the govt aid given to them, it eclipses any contributions. It's not the boomers that are the problem, it's the low skilled, illiterate illegals entering the Nation. Making them legal would open up a host of new benefits beyond what they may be getting now. It's a financial nightmare. The AID has to be STOPPED! All costs considered, it now exceeds 300 BILLION a year.

Here's the story from the link:

Immigration Becoming Part of the Solution

Who's Blogging» Links to this article
By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, February 8, 2008; 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- With Sen. John McCain now in a clear lead for the Republican nomination, it is safe to say that the days of "deport them all" rhetoric regarding immigration are likely over in the presidential contest.

Yet, the anti-illegal immigrant sentiment will continue to loom large in this year's political contests at the state and local level. What's more, immigration will remain so contentious around the country that Republican and Democratic insiders predict that comprehensive reform of the kind President Bush pursued but failed to pass will be a non-starter for at least the next four years.

But even if comprehensive immigration reform is off the political table, the time for a sober -- and realistic -- assessment of immigrants and their impact on the United States has already arrived. According to some demographers and urban planners, a serious discussion about immigration is taking place and in a different context: the unprecedented economic and societal demands caused by retiring baby boomers, the first of whom began drawing their Social Security checks this year.

Dowell Myers, author of "Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America," argues that policymakers will have to think of immigrants as part of a solution rather than a threat to America, as posited by many in recent years. A demographer at the University of Southern California who directs the Population Dynamics Research Group, Myers believes immigrants and their children will have to help the U.S. meet the huge costs of boomer retirement.

A significant shift will begin two years from now in what's called the "old age dependency ratio" -- the ratio of those economically dependent seniors to the productive segment of the population. Myers calculates that the dependency will climb sharply in the United States from 246 elderly per 1,000 working age residents in 2010 to 318 in 2020, on up to 411 in 2030 -- a 67 percent increase in 20 years.

In other words, there will be fewer and fewer workers to cover the government's growing obligations concerning the elderly. To finance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, "you are going to need every worker you can get," said Myers. He estimates that immigrants can meet up to one-fourth of the challenge.

But workers will also need greater skills to earn more money and thus more efficiently offset the costs of caring for the elderly. Some of those workers will continue to be the coveted skilled immigrants heading to Silicon Valley or the like. But a larger pool of them will be the children of immigrants, those coming of age in this country over the next 20 years.

Education then will play a key role. Donald J. Hernandez, a sociologist at the State University of New York at Albany who studies the well-being of racial and ethnic minority children in this country, put it simply: "To the extent we invest in children the better jobs they will have, the more money they will earn and the better it will be for the baby boomers."

Take housing, for instance. Over the next few years, many boomers will put their homes on the market as they move to the Sun Belt or away from busy urban centers. In states such as Connecticut, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, there are already more home sellers than buyers.

Immigrants and their children could have a big impact on the housing market, just as they have in recent years. According to census figures assessed by Myers, immigrants represented 40 percent of the growth in homebuyers nationwide between 2000 and 2006. In California, Illinois and New Jersey, they exceeded by far the share of new buyers who were native-born. In New Jersey, in fact, all of the growth over that period was due to immigrant buyers.

Many other industrialized nations have much the same problem with aging populations. Canada, for instance, has begun significant overtures to attract new workers from abroad. The government in Ottawa is investing more than $1.4 billion over five years to provide newcomers with orientation, counseling, language training and work referrals.

Myers is convinced that during the next president's watch "this will be a bigger, a more dominant concern ... than the Iraq War is today." Policymakers already are reconsidering many attitudes about retirement age, Social Security benefits and taxes. But nowhere will the thinking need to be more different than when it comes to immigration.

Marcela Sanchez's e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.

I would rather have an "aging problem" that what we had 100 years ago, an average life expectancy of 47 years!

Sorry Marcela, I don't see how hordes of people making minimum wage are going to save social security.

I think the aging epidemic is about as valid as the bird flu. Remember that one?