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Read in http://www.bijili.com on 02/27/03
The demographic realities of the 21st century are stark and inescapable: Rich countries are aging fast, and that will make keeping pension promises excruciatingly difficult. The Europeans and the Japanese aren't having enough babies to keep their populations from shrinking. Poor countries, despite the scourge of AIDS and spread of birth control, are growing much faster. Many are struggling to educate and employ their youth.
New United Nations projections, released Wednesday, show the population of more-developed regions growing at 0.25% a year and the population of less-developed regions growing nearly six times as fast, at 1.46% a year. Immigration from fecund, poorer countries to richer ones is a part of the answer.
A few countries are explicit about this: Canada has a stated goal of increasing immigration gradually until inflows reach roughly 1% of its population, up from about 0.85% currently. Thoughtful people in continental Europe and Japan understand the immigration imperative, but the general population and the average politician don't. The 15 countries of the European Union today have 2.6 working-age adults to pick up the pension tab for every person over 65; in 2050, they will have only 0.8, according to the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development in Paris.
The U.S. is in between: It remains a magnet for immigrants and an exemplar of the economic vitality that accompanies immigration. But rising unemployment, the bitterness of workers who bear the brunt of the pain that comes with globalization, and the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, contribute to a palpable increase in hostility to immigration. Footnotes to the reports by Social Security trustees, who anticipate 900,000 immigrants to the U.S. each year, underscore one economic benefit: Every additional 100,000 immigrants shaves 3% off the 75-year cost of fixing Social Security because of payroll taxes that immigrant workers will pay to finance the retirement of the baby boom.
The economic oomph of immigration is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. It was more significant in earlier eras even though travel was tougher. The wave of European immigration to the Western Hemisphere between 1870 and 1910 took 40% of Italy's labor force and 45% of Ireland's. The U.S. work force in 1910 was 24% larger than it would have been without immigration, according to economists Timothy Hatton of the University of Essex and Jeffrey G. Williamson of Harvard.
A return to flows of that magnitude is very unlikely. Immigration alone can't defuse the demographic time bomb. "Immigration doesn't really solve the problem in the long run," says Jeffrey Passell of the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "But it obviously helps."
The economic appeal of immigration, particularly to receiving countries, was more evident just a few years ago.
"Economic growth in the late 1990s, coupled with increasing concerns about aging populations, led many [industrialized] countries to envision using migration to ease labor shortages," the OECD says in its latest "Trends in International Migration" report. The flow of immigrants rose in the late 1980s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, slowed in the early 1990s as rich countries tightened controls, and then surged again at the end of the 1990s and the first couple of years of this decade, says the government-backed research agency.
One fact shines through all of these compendiums of facts of immigration: the exceptional nature of the U.S. The number crunchers at the U.N., for instance, figure that about two million people will move each year from China, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries to richer countries over the next 50 years. More than half, they project, will come to the U.S.
Although the demographic pressures aren't abating, the continuation of recent immigration trends isn't a certainty. Continued globalization, despite the rhetoric of proponents and critics, isn't inevitable. World War I proved that. A global economic downturn and all of the tensions produced by Sept. 11, 2001, and, more recently, by the prospect of war with Iraq could disrupt immigration flows.
It is "difficult," the cautious OECD analysts write, "to gauge the impact of those events ... or to predict whether they will reverse the trend in immigration flows." It is clear, though, that the Bush administration's eagerness to cut a deal with the Mexican government on immigration evaporated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that American public attitudes toward immigrants have turned more negative, and that Arab and Muslim immigrants -- not a large fraction of U.S. immigration -- aren't as welcome as they were before Sept. 11.
No one can know how long this will last, and whether it is a hiccup or a sea change. But we do know that the stakes are very large -- not only for the immigrants who seek better lives as the grandparents and parents of so many of today's native-born Americans did, but to the continued prosperity of the U.S. and other developed countries.
The demographic realities of the 21st century are stark and inescapable: Rich countries are aging fast, and that will make keeping pension promises excruciatingly difficult. The Europeans and the Japanese aren't having enough babies to keep their populations from shrinking. Poor countries, despite the scourge of AIDS and spread of birth control, are growing much faster. Many are struggling to educate and employ their youth.
New United Nations projections, released Wednesday, show the population of more-developed regions growing at 0.25% a year and the population of less-developed regions growing nearly six times as fast, at 1.46% a year. Immigration from fecund, poorer countries to richer ones is a part of the answer.
A few countries are explicit about this: Canada has a stated goal of increasing immigration gradually until inflows reach roughly 1% of its population, up from about 0.85% currently. Thoughtful people in continental Europe and Japan understand the immigration imperative, but the general population and the average politician don't. The 15 countries of the European Union today have 2.6 working-age adults to pick up the pension tab for every person over 65; in 2050, they will have only 0.8, according to the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development in Paris.
The U.S. is in between: It remains a magnet for immigrants and an exemplar of the economic vitality that accompanies immigration. But rising unemployment, the bitterness of workers who bear the brunt of the pain that comes with globalization, and the shock of Sept. 11, 2001, contribute to a palpable increase in hostility to immigration. Footnotes to the reports by Social Security trustees, who anticipate 900,000 immigrants to the U.S. each year, underscore one economic benefit: Every additional 100,000 immigrants shaves 3% off the 75-year cost of fixing Social Security because of payroll taxes that immigrant workers will pay to finance the retirement of the baby boom.
The economic oomph of immigration is hardly a new phenomenon, of course. It was more significant in earlier eras even though travel was tougher. The wave of European immigration to the Western Hemisphere between 1870 and 1910 took 40% of Italy's labor force and 45% of Ireland's. The U.S. work force in 1910 was 24% larger than it would have been without immigration, according to economists Timothy Hatton of the University of Essex and Jeffrey G. Williamson of Harvard.
A return to flows of that magnitude is very unlikely. Immigration alone can't defuse the demographic time bomb. "Immigration doesn't really solve the problem in the long run," says Jeffrey Passell of the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. "But it obviously helps."
The economic appeal of immigration, particularly to receiving countries, was more evident just a few years ago.
"Economic growth in the late 1990s, coupled with increasing concerns about aging populations, led many [industrialized] countries to envision using migration to ease labor shortages," the OECD says in its latest "Trends in International Migration" report. The flow of immigrants rose in the late 1980s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, slowed in the early 1990s as rich countries tightened controls, and then surged again at the end of the 1990s and the first couple of years of this decade, says the government-backed research agency.
One fact shines through all of these compendiums of facts of immigration: the exceptional nature of the U.S. The number crunchers at the U.N., for instance, figure that about two million people will move each year from China, India, Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia and other countries to richer countries over the next 50 years. More than half, they project, will come to the U.S.
Although the demographic pressures aren't abating, the continuation of recent immigration trends isn't a certainty. Continued globalization, despite the rhetoric of proponents and critics, isn't inevitable. World War I proved that. A global economic downturn and all of the tensions produced by Sept. 11, 2001, and, more recently, by the prospect of war with Iraq could disrupt immigration flows.
It is "difficult," the cautious OECD analysts write, "to gauge the impact of those events ... or to predict whether they will reverse the trend in immigration flows." It is clear, though, that the Bush administration's eagerness to cut a deal with the Mexican government on immigration evaporated after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, that American public attitudes toward immigrants have turned more negative, and that Arab and Muslim immigrants -- not a large fraction of U.S. immigration -- aren't as welcome as they were before Sept. 11.
No one can know how long this will last, and whether it is a hiccup or a sea change. But we do know that the stakes are very large -- not only for the immigrants who seek better lives as the grandparents and parents of so many of today's native-born Americans did, but to the continued prosperity of the U.S. and other developed countries.