The Quote Below—More Misinformation from the Media
“The details of this slowdown are even more discouraging. While the working-age population is stagnating, the senior population is exploding. Even under current levels of immigration, the Census Bureau projects that the senior population will grow by nearly 40 percent from now through 2035, almost exactly 10 times as fast as the working-age population. . . .
“Trump’s persistent attempts to restrict legal immigration belied his frequent insistence that he wanted people to come to the US but only if they followed the law. His effort reflected the cultural hostility to immigration of all sorts that now characterizes most of the GOP electorate. In a recent national survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Institute, almost three-fifths of Republicans agreed with the openly xenophobic statement that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background”; among Republicans who relied heavily on Fox News for information, agreement soared to two-thirds. . . .
“Those attitudes expose the great irony of the immigration debate. The nation’s growing diversity is centered among the young: . . . [T]he 2020 census will find that for the first time, a majority of the nation’s under-18 population is non-White. But because the US largely cut off immigration from 1924 to 1965, most older Americans are white.
“I’ve described this demographic contrast as a collision between ‘the brown and the gray,’ and one of its many implications is that through the 21st century, a growing and preponderantly white senior population will depend on an increasingly non-White working-age population to pay the taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.
“The older Whites in Trump’s coalition enthusiastically backing Republican politicians who promise to cut immigration are voting to endanger the entitlements on which they rely by slashing the number of working-age taxpayers available to support them.” – The Blind Spot in the Immigration Debate, Ronald Brownstein, CNN, 2/23/21 [CNN]
Fact Check of the Above Quote: This article claims that we need unending mass immigration to provide necessary workers and taxpayers to provide for our elderly. The facts don’t support this claim. Instead of a labor shortage during the next decade or two, we may have trouble providing enough jobs for native-born Americans. The reason is that within that time frame nearly 40 percent of the jobs now done by human may be automated.
Furthermore, immigration at the current level, or even much higher, will not significantly change the ratio of working age people to retirees. Among the reasons, the average age of immigrants is increasing while their birth rates are decreasing. If immigration continues as it is now, 59 percent of the population by 2060 will be of working age. If it stopped completely, the total will be 57 percent, only two percentage points less.
In any case, the idea that immigrants can sustain Social Security and Medicare is wrong. Both programs ultimately depend on general revenues, and legal and illegal immigrants on average take more from those revenues than they pay in taxes.
The author maintains that white American retirees should welcome non-white immigrants to support them. But would these immigrants vote to do so? Many might choose not to, especially if they are taught the rapidly-spreading Critical Race Theory which portrays white Americans as “privileged” oppressors.
The author slaps the politically-correct smear of “xenophobic” on the perfectly reasonable aversion of many Republicans to “cultural and ethnic replacement.” Nothing in this view suggests hatred of foreigners. Rather it suggests the concern of people who don’t want to be made foreigners in their own country.