How Young Immigrants Add to an Older Population

For a slew of reasons immigrants offset the downside of an aging population. Because they tend to be younger, immigrants bring dependency ratios down:As a result, we wind up with a larger working population that supports a retiree cohort. But, more precisely, that working population contributes to Social Security. A pay-as-you-go system, through Social Security, current workers’ taxes directly fund the Social Security checks sent to recipients.

Those tax dollars far exceed the amount of benefits immigrants receive:

Now, a new paper from three scholars (Harvard, MIT, University of Rochester), documents how immigrants boost the health of older Americans.

Immigrants and Elderly Healthcare

Many of us know that healthcare is a go-to career for many immigrants. As 18% of the healthcare workforce, they are our physicians, nurses, and aids. More specifically, immigrants are 26% of physicians and surgeons. In addition, 40% of home health aides, 28% of personal care aides, and 21% of nurse assistants are immigrants. Also, many immigrants compose the support staff at long-term care facilities and provide direct care.

Statistically, the proof of the immigrant impact on the elderly starts with mortality rates. One thousand more immigrants correlate to almost 10 (9.8) fewer elderly deaths. In addition, because the nursing home population declines when the immigrant population increases, the elderly remain home in a familiar environment rather than spending their final days in a skilled nursing facility. With 1,000 more immigrants, then 17.3 fewer older adults used those facilities.

Our Bottom Line: Human Capital

Defined as the store of knowledge with which we equip ourselves, human capital adds to our GDP. Just like factories become more productive when they add machinery, so too do humans when we add the knowledge that becomes our human capital. From here, we easily can leap to the store of human capital in our 2,700,000 healthcare workers. Also, we can add the less quantifiable support they bring to a growing elderly population.

Only the beginning, from all of these healthcare workers, we get spillover that creates the following numbers:

My sources and more: Thanks to David Wessel and the Hutchins Center for alerting me to the immigration paper. n addition, econlife looked at immigrant-related benefits, and at innovation.