As America Ages, We Must Boost Immigration — Not Crush It.

As America Ages, We Must Boost Immigration — Not Crush It.

As America continues to age and domestic birth rates decline, attracting new immigrants becomes all the more important for securing our fiscal future. With fewer and fewer workers supporting an expanding number of retirees, boosting immigration is essential to plugging the gap.

 

Contrary to the mythology advanced by the Trump administration and others who are working to restrict immigration across the board, immigrants overall, whether originally entering the nation legally or illegally, contribute far more money in tax dollars than they cost.   “For each year from 1994 to 2023, the US immigrant population generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government,” a new CATO Institute study documents.  The fiscal surplus generated over those 19 years by immigrants totals $14.5 trillion.

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“Without immigrants, US government public debt at all levels would be at least 205 percent of gross domestic product (GDP)—nearly twice its 2023 level,” CATO adds This is a conservative estimate, according to CATO, because it doesn’t include all the indirect benefits of immigration that fuel tax revenue-generating economic growth.

 

Given our aging population, robust levels of immigration are a key component in maintaining the solvency of Social Security and Medicare. These are both programs in which current workers fund the costs of direct payments and health benefits for retirees. “A sustained decline in immigration would substantially affect the financial health of these systems,” a Brookings Institution analysis points out. “For example, the 2025 Social Security Trustees Report suggests that halving long-run net migration from 1.696 million to 0.833 million would worsen the long-run actuarial deficit (the financial health of the program over the next 75 years) by 25%.”

 

In addition to these direct budgetary benefits are the aforementioned broader economic pluses that also better the fiscal bottom line.  Immigration fuels economic growth through bringing new entrepreneurial energy and innovation, increasing the labor force, and providing new consumers.  Nearly 1-in-2 Fortune 500 companies, for example, were founded by immigrants or their children.

 

The importance to our economic future of continuing to attract the world’s strivers to our shores in relatively large numbers is what makes the Trump administration’s general approach to immigration so counterproductive. While the administration’s success in limiting illegal immigration through tougher border security is an accomplishment, its slowing down of legal immigration as well as its constant demonization of immigrants are making the United States less welcoming to those seeking a better life. The result will be less economic growth and consequently, a tougher fiscal challenge.

 

Since the Trump administration is making a fundamental course correction hard to envision, in all likelihood, it will be up to the next president to fix our immigration system, expanding legal immigration while maintaining border security.  As I wrote in a previous column, “Mr. Trump’s success on border security has created the opportunity to pass legislation that continues to be tough on the border and deporting violent criminals, but also creates a path to legalization and citizenship for long-time undocumented residents, increases skills-based legal immigration, takes care of the Dreamers, and fixes our broken asylum system.”  This is an opportunity for a bipartisan success that will be open to the next president, whether they turn out to be a Democrat or a Republican.

 

Throughout our history, our not-so-secret sauce has been that we are a nation of immigrants, continually revitalized economically and culturally by attracting the world’s best and brightest to our shores.  The aging of our population ups the urgency of returning to an immigration policy that reflects this fundamental reality.