Open-Borders Advocates Trot Out Old Social Security Myths

"The size of Social Security's financial shortfall in the decades ahead will depend partly on how many people are allowed to immigrate to the United States, a report to be released on Wednesday shows," the New York Times writes. "The report was written by Stuart Anderson, who was a senior official at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in President Bush's first term and is now executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan research center in Arlington, Va."

[FAIR Comment: Like a lot of open-borders myths, the idea that immigrants will save Social Security is not a new one. It last surfaced when Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan cited immigration as one way to make Social Security solvent.

In response, FAIR produced "A Ponzi Problem" – a brief study debunking the reasoning behind these claims. Here's one quote from our report: "If you look at immigration from the point of view of this macro-picture, immigration does not make very much difference. That is, if you vary the amount of immigration in line with the kinds of scenarios the Census or Social Security uses, everyone’s middle immigration assumption is about one million net immigrants per year or 900,000 per year. If you varied that, say, between 700,000 or 1.3 million you would get maybe a 10 percent difference in the old age dependency ratio out here [at 2070]. That is, instead of being .3, it might be .27, that kind of variation. It is not big. When the immigrants come, they get old like everyone else and they enter the numerator instead of the denominator. The only way you can really get a permanent effect out of immigration is if you have not just high immigration but exponentially increasing numbers of immigrants. . . "

Source - Ronald Lee, Director of the Center for the Economics and Demography of Aging, University of California Berkeley), Public Costs of Long Life and Low Fertility: Will the Baby Boomers Break the Budget?, November 19, 1997.]