I thought part of being a responsible citizen meant not having more kids than you can support financially. According to this logic every next generation of families will have to have more kids than the previous generation so they can provide health care services for the previous generation, What a load of bull! According to the globalist there are to many people on earth as it is, now which is the truth? They can't have it both ways can they? If they think I'm going to let my family members be taken care of by un ethical illegal immigrants, they are mistaken. They are my family and I'll take care of them. Its just like the 3 and 4 year old day care centers, you let the government take care of them while you slave for the man! Yeah, right! They try so hard to sell this corrpution everyday. It just ain't working around my area.



Thinking on immigration must evolve.

MARCELA SANCHEZ:
02/08/08

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 nonstarter 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 U.S. 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 411 in 2030 -- a 67% increase in 20 years.

In other words, there will be 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 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 will be the children of immigrants, those coming of age in this country over the next 20 years.

Education will be key. 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 the U.S., 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. Over the next few years, many boomers will put their homes on the market as they move 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% 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 the same problem with aging populations. Canada 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 is a columnist with the Washington Post Writers Group (1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071). Her e-mail address is desdewash@washpost.com.

http://www.fresnobee.com/opinion/wo/story/382686.html