Question:
Immigration Cannot Save Social Security. Reality Check?
Answer:
There is an unexamined myth that immigration will provide a treatment for
the disasterous aging of the population seen in the western world that will
force people to retire much later, force women to spend more time in the
workforce(thus reducing the birth rate even more) while taxing the social
security system to the limit.
The benefits of immigration are seldom costed properly. Most comprehensive
studies show that immigraion is not good for those people in a country
already. Advantages are only to select areas of the economy and select
individuals positioned to exploit those areas. (Cheap labour and
lacklustere companies that need market growth.) There is no correlation
between GDP/head and population or population growth or immigration. If you
can use a spreadsheet you can do this yourself using the CORREL function.
It comes out slightly negative in fact.
A new study by economist John Attarian, a Ph.D. in economics from the
University of Michigan and a free-lance writer, takes the untruth apart in a
new monograph, "Immigration: Wrong Answer for Social Security," available
from Americans for Immigration Control.
Anyone who thinks mass immigration will support us in our old age needs to
read it through.
One of the major myths comes from Open Borders activist Stephen Moore,
formerly of the libertarian Cato Institute. In 1998 Mr. Moore came out with
a study that laid the basic building block of what would soon become an
entire pyramid of unexamined assumptions and untested assertions.
The argument is that, since the American population is aging and a smaller
generation of taxpayers contributing to the Social Security funds in the
future, only vast numbers of immigrants can save us from ruin. Mr. Moore
argued that immigration was already "keeping Social Security afloat" and, as
Dr. Attarian writes, "that an increase of annual net immigration would raise
immigration's revenue contribution to $2,148 billion. Therefore, immigration
would be crucial to any solution to Social Security's problems."
But, Dr. Attarian points out, Mr. Moore's study is seriously flawed. It
"rests on a confusion of three totally unrelated concepts," "employs an
unsound method" that mixes up present-day monetary values with others
corrected for inflation, and - probably most important - comes up with
calculations that don't even add up.
For the period 1998-2072, the Social Security deficit is projected to be
some $16 trillion, but "Increasing annual immigration to one million [as Mr.
Moore advocates] would increase revenue by 0.9 percent and reduce the
deficit by just 3.0 percent. The inescapable conclusion is that immigrants
are hardly 'keeping Social Security afloat,' and that massive increases
immigration will not do much to save it."
Mr. Moore is not the only Open Borders advocate to claim that immigration
will save Social Security.
Ben Wattenberg, long a boomer of virtually bottomless immigration, has
written that mass immigration "is the easy solution to the Social Security
crisis" because it increases the population of working adults who pay taxes.
Mr. Wattenberg thinks that if we "doubled our annual net immigration . it
would reduce Social Security's deficit by 28 percent," a claim even more
extreme than the flawed projections of Mr. Moore.
Dr. Attarian pinpoints the arithmetic fallacies in Mr. Wattenberg's
calculations but also points out that the argument is "simplistic, because
it assumes that immigration has only one, positive effect on Social
Security's outlook: immigrants take jobs and pay Social Security benefits."
In fact, mass immigration, at current levels and even more so at the level
Mr. Wattenberg wants, would "affect things like labor productivity and
wages," which are likely to decline. Since Social Security is financed by
taxes on labor incomes, its revenues would decline as well.
"Furthermore," Dr. Attarian writes, "the majority of immigrants have little
education and low skills, and work in menial, poorly-paid jobs. Such
immigrants are necessarily poor Social Security taxpayers, which implies
that adding many more of them is unlikely to save the program." The
Wattenberg thesis, he reasons, is without merit.
Moreover, a "massive increase in America's population" like that the Open
Borders pushers demand "would calamitously overload our environment" and
resources like water, land and energy.
Aside form the social and cultural damage that would ensue, the economy
itself would be harmed and potential revenues for Social Security diminished
still further.
Of course, the Open Borders lobby cares nothing for the environment and it
really cares nothing for Social Security either. The libertarians and free
marketeers pretending to fret about the future of the program have typically
advocated its abolition anyway.
What the Open Borders really cares about is immigration pure and simple --
to bring in cheap labor drive down the wages of American workers, and import
a new electorate that can be manipulated into supporting its candidates.
The "saving Social Security" myth is simply one more fairy tale invented by
the advocates of mass immigration to lull the rest of the country to sleep.
If more Americans take a look at Dr. Attarian's impressive dissection of the
fairy tale, they may start waking up before they lose their country and
their future.
Canada's family reunification immigration policy, which accounts for just
over 60 per cent of all immigrants arriving in Canada each year, actually
ages our population because so many arrivals in this category are elderly
parents of economic migrants. So much for the argument we need immigration
to off-set the natural aging of our population.
it comes out slightly negative???? - what does?? what numbers are
you giving?? this is the silliest 'argument' for anything that i have ever
heard.
Why does nobody (talking about the UK now) think that family
reunification can be done in their countries of origin? Why is the
unthinking assumption always made that family reunification can only
happen the country which is already overburdened?
