The Latino Growth

SPANISH VERSION

Resistance to a comprehensive immigration reform is myopic and ignores the demographic changes in the U.S. and what those changes mean to the future.

It is estimated, for example, that by 2020 40% of the workforce growth will be of Hispanic workers. This percentage could later reach 75%, according to an analisys by the IHS Global Insight firm.

Those numbers are the result of the aging of the white non-Hispanic population, and the youth of the Latino community. Basically, the proportional growth of the white population will be zero due to the retirement of the baby boomers – the generation born between 1946 and 1964. The birth rate of the following generation of non-Hispanic whites is not enough to replace those retiring to keep up with the white percentage in the newly created jobs.

This does not mean that immigrants are going to take the natives’ jobs, as some might interpret maliciously. Actually, since last year most Latino workers in the workforce were U.S.-born. A percentage that keeps growing every year because of the demographic tendencies at play.

The growth of the Latino workforce is good news for everyone, especially those retired. Those workers will be the ones who, with their income taxes, will pay for the baby boomer’s retirement – mostly non-Hispanic whites.

Now, the idea of deporting the undocumented parents of those workers, who are now benefiting from President Obama’s executive action, is madness. Even with the costitutional considerations used in the House of Representatives, a deportation is a deportation after all.

This is the future, those are the demographics. Wheter you like it or not. We must overcome the stereotypes and prejudices of the past because time does not go backwards or stops. It goes forward.

The law is the law, but it takes a lot of blindness and ideological stubbornness to legislate on immigration thinking about the past and ignoring the future