ANOTHER FALLACIOUS ARGUMENT holds that it will be necessary in the future for aging countries with low fertility rates like those of Europe and North America to import enormous numbers of immigrants to maintain the “dependency ratio”—the ratio of workers to retirees and other dependents, including children. This argument is intuitively plausible—and dead wrong.
How many immigrants would be needed to maintain today’s dependency ratio in the US indefinitely? In 2000, the UN Population Division calculated that in order to maintain the worker-to-retiree ratio in the US, the US would have to increase legal immigration from roughly 1 million a year to 12 million a year, adding more than half a billion additional net immigrants to the US population by 2050.28 Using more recent data, the Center for Immigration Studies has estimated that maintaining the US worker-to-retiree ratio would require increasing immigration fivefold, more than doubling the US population between now and 2060, to 706 million.29 Even worse, in order to maintain a fixed dependency ratio of workers to an ever-growing number of retirees, the US would need to import ever-growing numbers of immigrants until the unsustainable demographic Ponzi scheme collapsed when the rest of the world was depopulated.
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However, many of these fast-growing jobs are growing rapidly from tiny bases (the list also includes “bicycle repairers”). What about occupations with the greatest absolute number of job openings? Here the only STEM job category among the top ten is “software developers, applications” at number four, paying $101,790 a year. The other categories with the most openings in the US are personal care aides; combined food preparation and serving workers, including fast food; registered nurses; home health aides; janitors and cleaners, except maids and housekeeping cleaners; general and operations managers; laborers and freight, stock, and material movers; medical assistants; and waiters and waitresses.
Among these non-STEM jobs, only two pay relatively well—general and operations managers ($100,410) and registered nurses ($70,000). These happen to be the only two that require college degrees, according to the BLS. None of the other jobs with the greatest absolute growth in the US pay more than the annual salary of a medical assistant ($32,480).
In a 2018 Pew Research Center poll of twenty-seven countries that take half of the world’s immigrants, including the US, Canada, and Western European nations, a median of 45 percent wanted fewer or no immigrants and 36 percent were satisfied with the existing number. Only 14 percent thought their countries should allow more immigrants. In the US in 2018, a mere 24 percent wanted to admit greater numbers of immigrants each year, while 73 percent wanted the same number (44 percent) or fewer to none (29 percent). In Germany, where Chancellor Angela Merkel allowed a large influx of Syrian and other refugees in 2015, 58 percent wanted fewer or no immigrants and only 19 percent wanted a higher level of immigration. In both Britain and France, only 16 percent favored raising the level of immigration.
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