Robert Reich - of the "white male construction workers" quote fame - offers "Immigration: Could it solve Social Security, Medicare woes? /To keep Social Security and Medicare from running out of money, the US will have to raise taxes, lower benefits, or cut other spending. Or it could boost immigration" (link). There are at least a couple things he won't discuss and his economic judgment is more than a bit questionable. He says:

Forty years ago there were five workers for every retiree. Now there are three. Within a couple of decades, there will be only two workers per retiree. There’s no way just two workers will be able or willing to pay enough payroll taxes to keep benefits flowing to every retiree... This is where immigration comes in. Most immigrants are young because the impoverished countries they come from are demographically the opposite of rich countries. Rather than aging populations, their populations are bursting with young people... One logical way to deal with the crisis of funding Social Security and Medicare is to have more workers per retiree, and the simplest way to do that is to allow more immigrants into the United States... Immigration reform and entitlement reform have a lot to do with one another.

1. As with the other entries on the immigration economics page, Reich isn't considering all the costs involved with his scheme. What if that massive immigration has other costs - fiscal or not - that outweigh any benefits? That mass immigration will give even more power inside the U.S. to foreign governments and the far-left. Even if someone thinks the second isn't an issue (or supports it), the first isn't debatable: it reduces the political power that U.S. citizens have. That's one of the very many costs that Reich isn't factoring in to his equation.

2. An amnesty - "comprehensive immigration reform" - would primarily benefit low-wage, low-skilled Mexicans and others from Latin America. They and their descendants - considering all of them as a group and not discussing individual cases - are not going to be making huge amounts of money or creating large numbers of new jobs. Would they be able to sustain their "assigned number of retirees" (per Reich's formula above)? Even if you think they would, wouldn't accepting only high-skilled immigrants be the wiser choice, if your only goal is to pay for entitlements? Wouldn't higher-skilled workers be able to sustain a greater number of retirees? If, for instance, we could trade a million low-wage illegal aliens from Mexico for high-tech workers from India, wouldn't we all be in the chips? I have a feeling that Reich would flee frantically from questions along those lines.

3. Why exactly does Reich think that those who aren't white would be willing to support an aging white population? Let's start at the college professor who made the "aging white population" quote. Can anyone see him or those like him twenty years from now supporting anything beyond the barest of entitlements to those like Robert Reich? Wouldn't it be more likely that those only slightly less radical - the heirs of those like Gil Cedillo or Fabian Nunez - would (using code words) move to shrink benefits to aged whites in order to give them to other Hispanics? I have a feeling Reich would flee frantically from such questions too.