Baby Boomers vs Immigration Boomers

Most of us have read about the baby boomer issue and how importing immigrant labor is being used to offset shortages in Social Security funding.

"80 million baby boomers will be retiring in the next 20 years."

The graph below, displays the adult immigration rate per age group from the BLS Non Institutionalized Civilian Workforce statistics. The baseline is the 25 to 34 year old group, always 100%, there can be no births in this age-group, all increases must be from immigration. The 'x' axis is the year of birth, 100% represents the year that the individual became 25 years of age. (The 'x' axis ends in 1972 because we've run out of 35 year old persons to make a comparison.)

In the 35 to 44 year old age group, the population's percentage increase is displayed in the group, again by year of birth. We can see elevated immigration rates in the Depression, World War II and the bubble economics era.

The alarming portion of the 35 to 44 year old age group is the extremely high immigration rate in recent times.

In the 45 to 54 year old age-group, we see some departures, deaths or a combination of both. These workers will likely remain in the U.S. to collect Social Security. (The 45 to 54 age groups runs out of data because individuals with this year of birth have not yet attained this age.)


Click on image to enlarge:

For completeness I've included the Census Birth rates.




And the U.S. death rates by age group.