Boomers Need Immigrants

TA new book by USC planning professor Dowell Myers, Immigrants and Boomers, looks to California as a bellwether state -- where whites are no longer a majority of the population and represent just a third of residents under age twenty -- to afford us a glimpse into the future impact of immigration on the rest of the nation. Myers opens with an examination of the roots of voter resistance to providing social services for immigrants.

Drawing on detailed census data, Myers demonstrates that long-established immigrants have been far more successful than the public believes. Among the Latinos who make up the bulk of California’s immigrant population, those who have lived in California for over a decade show high levels of social mobility and use of English, and 50 percent of Latino immigrants become homeowners after 20 years. The impressive progress made by immigrant families suggests they have the potential to pick up the slack from aging boomers over the next two decades.

The mass retirement of the boomers will leave critical shortages in the educated workforce, while shrinking ranks of middle-class tax payers and driving up entitlement expenditures. In addition, as retirees sell off their housing assets, the prospect of a generational collapse in housing prices looms. Myers suggests that it is in the boomers’ best interest to invest in the education and integration of immigrants and their children today in order to bolster the ranks of workers, taxpayers, and homeowners America they will depend on 10 and 20 years from now.