Older Population to More Than Double

Feb 11 07:08 PM US/Eastern
By SUZANNE GAMBOA
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - Future immigrants and their descendants will account for most of the increase among working-age adults through 2050, but growth in the older population will outpace all other groups, the Pew Hispanic Center reported Monday.
The faster growth in the older population means costs per worker for programs that help seniors and young children, under 17 years old, will go up, according to the center's researchers.

"Future immigration lessens the load on each worker, but it's not a big effect. The dependency is going to increase regardless of what we do with immigration," said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer at Pew Hispanic.

The Pew researchers project that by 2050 the nation's population will total about 438 million, as long as today's immigration, fertility and other population trends continue.

Most of the overall population growth, 82 percent, will be the result of immigrants arriving between 2005 and 2050, as well as their children and grandchildren.

The number of working-age adults—ages 18 to 64—will rise from 186 million three years ago to 255 million in 2050. Foreign born adults will account for 23 percent in 2050 of the population, while non- Hispanic whites drop from 68 percent to 45 percent of the group.

But the nation's population of seniors, those 65 and over, will more than double in size to 81 million by 2050, largely due to baby boomer retirements, according to the report by Passel and center senior writer D'Vera Cohn. The last of the baby boom generation will reach 65 in 2029.

That combination will add up to 32 seniors for every 100 working age adults, up from 20 right now. Together with young children, there will be 72 seniors and children per 100 working-age adults in 2050, up from 59 in 2005.

If immigration were halved, there would be 75 seniors and children per 100 working-age adults and with immigration 50 percent higher, there would be 69 dependents per 100 of those in the working-age group.

"The reason this is going to happen is not what's going on in the future, it's what went on in the past," Passel said. "It's because our parents had so many kids."

The center's future population growth numbers are higher than those of the Census, which calculated a population of 420 million in 2050. The researchers said that is because the Census projects lower immigration numbers.

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