POPULATION SUPPORT RATIO

I have started to more seriously focus on the immigration issue in the United States. Building a fence does not seem to be a solution to me, but I do think the borders have to be controlled. We need to know who is in our country. I am not sure some politicians realize how important immigration is to the future of the United States and developed nations in general, especially Western Europe and Japan. We are just not having the births necessary to support our future senior citizens.

The United Nations has a term "population support ratio" (PSR) that I think is helpful. I am reading the Pentagon's New Map by Thomas Barnett. He makes the following point: The big hitch is this: Current U.N. projections say that by 2050, the potential support ratio (psr, or people aged 15-to-64 per one person 65-and-older) in the advanced economies will have dropped from 5-to-1 to 2-to-1, while in the least developed regions the psr still will stand at roughly 10-to-1. That means that worker-to-retiree ratios in the Core will plummet just as the retirement burden there skyrockets - unless the Gap's "youth bulges" flow toward the older Core states. Japan will require more than half a million immigrants per year to maintain its current workforce size, while the European Union will need to increase its current immigrant flow roughly fivefold - but both have great difficulty acceding to that need.

Immigrants (legal or illegal) are helping keep America's PSR higher--it is not what it should be, but the US is much better off than Japan and some European countries if you are looking at 2050. The UN has a chart projecting the percentage of the population 60 or older. By 2050 41% of the population of Italy will be over 60; for Japan 42% of the population will be over 60; for the US 26% will be over 60. The average for developed countries is 32%.