An Infusion of Youth.

• Author: Jackson, Richard
• Position: LIFE IN AMERICA

"The U.S. always has been a nation of immigrants, and most Americans instinctively understand that immigration still has a vital role to play in its aging future." IT SEEMS that immigration never is out of the news these days. There is, of course, the crisis triggered by the surge in asylum seekers arriving at the southern border; backlog of refugee applications; and contentious debate over policy issues that never seem to be resolved, from how best (or even whether) to secure the southern border and offer a path to citizenship to unauthorized immigrants who already are here, especially the so-called Dreamers.

Lost in all of this is any sense of the bigger picture. You never would know from the current debate that net immigration actually has been declining, from an average of 1,300,000 per year from 1990-2007 and the beginning of the Great Recession to 900,000 per year since then. Moreover, even as immigration has been declining, its importance to demographic and economic growth has been increasing.

With the large baby boom generation retiring and relatively smaller generations taking its place, immigration already is the only reason that the U.S. still has a growing workforce. By the 2040s, it will be the only reason that the U.S. still has a growing population.

America's story can in large part be told as a story of immigrants. Yet, as important as immigration always has been in shaping the nation's character and culture, it never has been as critical to growth and prosperity as it will be in coming decades. Several developed countries, most notably Australia and Canada, have made immigration the linchpin of their long-term strategy for confronting population aging. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to lurch from near-term crisis to near-term crisis. Immigration needs to be placed in the broader context of the U.S.'s changing demographics and it should be explained why the country needs more of it, not less. Let's also clear up a number of widespread misconceptions about the costs and benefits of immigration that distort the current debate.

The object here is not to take positions on specific policy issues, much less offer a comprehensive immigration reform plan. There is more than one way to reform the system so that it better serves the U.S.'s needs. What is critical is that policymakers engage the challenge.

America finds itself at a demographic crossroads. Until recently, the U.S. was a demographic outlier among its developed world peers. After dipping well beneath the 2.1 replacement rate needed to maintain a stable population from one generation to the next in the 1970s, the U.S. total fertility rate partially recovered as boomers got around to starting families. From the beginning of the 1990s until the Great Recession, it averaged 2.0, higher than the average for any other developed country except Iceland, Israel, and New Zealand.

Together with substantial net immigration, the U.S.'s relatively high fertility rate seemed to ensure that it would remain the youngest of the major developed countries for the foreseeable future. It also seemed to ensure that America would maintain a growing workforce, even as those in other developed countries stagnated or declined.

Over the past decade, however, the U.S. has begun to look much more like a typical developed country. America's fertility rate began to decline in 2008 and, except for a minor uptick in 2014, has fallen every year since. By 2019, on the eve of the pandemic, it had dropped to 1.7, an all-time historical low. The pandemic has driven it even lower, to 1.6 in 2020 and perhaps to as low as 1.5 in 2021.

At the same time, net immigration---that is, the number of immigrants minus the number of emigrants--also has declined. After rising during the 1990s and early 2000s, it sank to near zero in 2008 during the depths of the Great Recession. Since then, net immigration has followed a roller-coaster path. It experienced a partial recovery in the early 2010s, but began to decline again starting in 2015. The decline then became a plunge in 2020 as immigration was curtailed dramatically amid the pandemic-related border closings.

Initially, many demographers assumed that millennials merely were postponing family formation rather than deciding to have fewer children, and that the total fertility rate soon would begin rising again, but the oldest millennials now are turning 40, and there still is no sign of this "tempo effect."

Although some post-pandemic recovery in birthrates is possible, a return to the substantially higher levels of the 1990s and early 2000s seems increasingly unlikely unless the longer-term developments that have depressed birthrates are reversed. The most important of...