Immigration is quickly coming to the fore as our country’s most contentious issue. It needn’t be. We can construct policy that helps our citizens regain control while growing our population and improving our demographics problem. To achieve this, we will first talk about security, then move on to what exactly our demographics issue is, and finally move into a sensible solution.
Kicking off, let’s get into border security. Those two words never seem to stray too far from our president’s lips, so it must be addressed. We have been inundated with stories of violent gang members committing heinous crimes and terrorist attacks perpetrated on Western soil. While a majority of those attacks have in fact come from natives of each country, enough have been carried out by immigrants to push the narrative against them. The potential for a real disaster is simply too visceral for the public psyche to avoid. A wall, however, would do near enough to nothing actually decreasing the flow of bad actors to make erecting one an exercise in futility that would achieve no more than publishing a monumental need for a security blanket to the world.
Real security from organized crime would involve removing profit centers from the cartels through legalization of some drugs while taking proper care of addicts. A more expansive examination of that measure is beyond the scope of this essay, but that would significantly weaken the criminal enterprises south of our borders. Even eliminating entire cartels only serves to temporarily reduce the influence of this criminal activity. The relatively inelastic demand for their product coupled with the monopoly they have created by governmental restrictions paired with paramilitary resources squashing competition means new ones just spring up like weeds. Their income must be restricted to eliminate their power. Restrictive immigration policy nor a wall do anything to mitigate it.
Terrorism, meanwhile, is a much more complex issue. We (the US) have been fortunate not to have a major attack since 9/11. Nevertheless, it has been present enough in Europe that the occasional minor attack on American soil keeps it as a persistent political issue. A comprehensive solution to terrorism is also beyond the scope of this essay and frankly my knowledge, but a broad overview would likely involve reaching out to the disaffected and continuing to explore ways to improve identification of potentially violent actors. By reaching out to the disaffected, we can better integrate them into society and by identifying the potentially violent we can better monitor them. This relates to border security only in that we would need to use sophisticated screening on visa and asylum applicants. Pooling of information between intelligence agencies and border control would be essential.
With a firm grip on security and regular communication of the important steps taken to ensure it, people can let go of those fears. That, in turn, opens the door to greater cooperation and collaboration between political parties on comprehensive policy to scale up legal immigration. This just so happens to be the cheapest, easiest, and simplest solution to our demographics issue.
If you have never thought about our demographics as a problems in the past, you can be forgiven as it has remained remarkably absent from any significant media coverage or public debate despite a rapidly approaching specter of ballooning pension liabilities coupled with a plateau of prime working age population. Look at those graphs! The coming retirement of the baby boomer generation is a terrifying prospect indeed and ignoring it will not make it go away. Longer lifespans and lower birthrates have combined to create over $34 trillion in unfunded obligations by the Social Security Administration’s own calculation as of 2018 for Social Security alone. The addition of medicare likely doubles this number. Rather than continue to pour on the numbers, I’ll simplify the status of our finances into three words: we are fucked.
Employment ratio of prime working age population shows low growth is not because of millennials playing video games in their parents’ basements.
Prime working age population has plateaued.
Total population has continued to grow.
Because the share of those over 65 has skyrocketed.
And here’s a chart of American demographics.
What, then, could possibly be done? As you can see from the above demographic chart, this bomb will explode within 10 years. One of two things (or, preferably, both) needs to happen. Productivity needs to grow at an unprecedented rate. If we rely on that alone it would literally have to grow by an order of magnitude. Alternatively, we need a MASSIVE influx of young people to grow the population over which these obligations are spread. Since hoping for a spontaneous outbreak of prosperity far greater than in the history of humanity is likely not the wisest course of action, we are left with growing the working age population. Let’s make some babies! The only difficulty is that we’ll have to create a culture shift only seen before following major wars. And we’ll have to put them to work at age 5. What we are left with one last possible solution: the much-maligned, much-celebrated migrant.
Skilled (and unskilled) workers are quite literally lining up at our gates. All we need to do is let them in. Immediate steps need to be taken if we are to address this problem. We make it extraordinarily difficult for graduates from American universities (even PhDs!) to stay after they finish their degrees. We need to create a new, expanded student visa that allows graduates to stay 10 years after graduation. We need to make it easier for people to apply for (and receive) permanent status via green cards after working here (and paying taxes) for 3-5 years. We can even charge them a significant fee to receive the green cards as an additional revenue booster. Something as high as $5,000-10,000 will seem a small price to pay for someone who has built a life here to have the stability and peace of mind such a status grants. We need to make it easier to skilled migrants to receive H1-B visas by vastly increasing the number we give each year; perhaps we could even remove the limit. This program has a been a boon to companies struggling to find people to fill positions and grow. Restricting it places small businesses at an unfair disadvantage to large companies that have the resources to perfect applications; they out-compete by bureaucracy. Finally, we need to lower the bar for people fleeing violence to claim asylum. They will be grateful for the opportunity to create a new life and happy to work hard. We can even require a set amount of years of work before offering any financial aid or welfare to prevent abuse of the system. Screen, yes, but welcome those who pass with open arms.
The economy is not a zero-sum game. Increasing population means more consumers, more employers, and a bigger pie. The bigger pie is the only way we will be able to fulfill our obligations to our elderly without being crippled from doing anything else. Forget all the appeals to humanity. There are plenty of reasons to choose from that are self-interested and patriotic.