Who, Myers asked in his book, "Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America," will fill the skilled jobs held by the millions of retiring baby boomers in the decades ahead? Who will be able to buy their homes?
Myers' answer: For a large percentage of those retirees, their replacements will have to come from among undocumented and their children, the people who will compose the largest part of California's working-age and home-buying population, and an increasing part of the U.S. population as well. At the same time, the sharp decline in the Mexican birthrate of the past generation will slow the growth of that country's labor force and reduce the pressure to emigrate.
In another decade or
two, we may need more people of
working and home-buying age than
we've got.
Newly compiled census data on
California (remember, as
California goes so goes the USA)
homeownership, combined with
recent economic and demographic
reports from Mexico and the
United States, confirm both
points.
Begin with the housing factor.
In a report released this month,
Myers shows the dramatic
generational and ethnic changes
in California homeownership.
As the number of older, white
homeowners continued to shrink
from the 1980s through the first
decade of this century through
relocation, entry into assisted
living or rental housing, or
death most of their homes were
bought not by younger whites but
by Latinos.
In the 2000s, the total number
of what the census calls
non-Hispanic white homeowners in
California declined by nearly
158,000. In the same decade,
even as the percentage of all
Californians owning their own
homes went down, the number of
Hispanic homeowners in the state
increased by nearly 384,000,
accounting for more than 78% of
the growth in California's
homeownership.
As early as 2005, Myers wrote in
"Immigrants and Boomers," the
most common surnames of new
California home buyers were
Garcia, Hernandez, Rodriguez,
Lopez and Martinez. Nationwide,
four of the top 10 names were
Hispanic.
"It is young Hispanic home
buyers, and also Asians, who
have taken up the slack from
diminished white demand," Myers
says in his new report. In the
coming years, however, there'll
be even fewer whites to replace
those old homeowners. "The clear
challenge [then] will be how to
pick up the growing slack
. 'Who
is going to buy your house?' has
become an important question for
all of us."
There's a related question,
crucial for both California and
the nation: Who'll have the job
skills to replace those retiring
boomers in the future?
While media attention has been
focused on the Mexican drug wars
and our own political battles
over immigration, the big story
may well be the growth of the
Mexican economy and the
increasing number of economic
and educational opportunities it
offers.
In the last four years the U.S.
population of undocumented
immigrants declined from roughly
12 million to 11 million.
Detentions of undocumented
aliens by the Border Patrol are
also sharply down. According to
the Pew Hispanic Center, the
number of undocumented
border-crossers who settled in
the United States dropped from
the annual average of 525,000 in
the first years of this century
to fewer than 100,000 last year.
Some of those changes are due to
the economic troubles of the
last four years; some may be due
to tougher enforcement of
immigration laws. But some may
also be attributable to the
declining Mexican birthrate and
Mexico's improving economy.
The biggest issue of the next
decade may not be closing the
border to undocumented aliens
but opening opportunities,
especially higher education, to
undocumented and their children.
Yet as boomers retire by the
millions beginning in this
decade, taking their skills with
them, California, rather than
making college and other
advanced education more
accessible, is making access
harder, shutting down programs
and increasing the costs.
"Cultivating a stronger base of
future home buyers," Myers says,
"will help the older generation
as much as the young. This
partnership needs to be
strengthened between older
future home sellers and younger
potential home buyers."
So far, however, the critical
economic and social nexus
between the self-interest of
older white homeowners and the
younger Hispanics and other
undocumented who represent much
of the state's future is hardly
perceived by much of
California's tax-averse
electorate.
According to scholars such as
Harvard economist Alberto
Alesina, the greater the ethnic
gap between voters and the
perceived beneficiaries of
public goods education, social
welfare and health programs and
other services the more
reluctant voters are to support
the taxes to pay for them.
The California of the 1950s and
1960s, which was overwhelmingly
white and middle class,
generously provided for those
public goods. The California of
the last three decades, in which
undocumented and their children
have become an increasingly
large part of the population,
has not. We are crippling our
own economic future.
