Courtesy of Lindsay Brice (Flickr)
Whether you are on your way to work or just talking with friends, a topic that frequently comes up is immigration. Many people have strong views on what they believe should be done about immigration, but how exactly do these immigrants affect us?
One major factor to consider in the immigration debate is the contribution immigrants make to the population size of the United States. Although this idea may sound unappealing to the general public, we are actually benefiting from this increase. In the United States, birth rate has been decreasing, and it is currently the lowest it has been since 1920 (Bahrampour). We must think of immigration in the context of many other influential factors including the fact that people are now more career driven, there is a greater focus on education, many people are getting married later in their life, and the economy is declining.
The current birth rate is so low that is falls below the replacement level of 2.1 kids (Overberg). An influx of immigrant families to the United States helps increase our birth rate (Overberg). It is crucial that we maintain a sufficient younger population because the elderly depend on it to fund social programs. In order for this to happen, there has to be enough people in the workforce. For this reason, the birth rate should ideally be at the replacement level of 2.1, so that for each elderly person, there is a younger person in the work force.
As we become more focused on our careers and as long as the economy is in decline, the birth rate will most likely decrease. In order to avoid increasing the difference in population size between the youth and the elderly, we need immigrants.
Immigration Talk 
This is a really good point. What one can take from this is that it’s inevitable that immigrants are going to run this country very soon. All the arguing and debating we do will not stop the fact that the children of immigrants are the future, and there is no way of stopping that, so we should probably stop being stubborn and put a little more effort and $$ into giving them decent educations, and stop giving them reasons to fear/hate authority and white people.
This is a great post! A lot of people are still under the impression that immigrants “steal jobs” and hurt the economy, but this along with many other studies show that it simply isn’t true. This also could include an article by Hirschman called “Immigration and the American Century.” It’s quick, to the point, and credible because of the sources included.