How Immigration Trends Impact Life Expectancy — and the Fiscal Results
If I had been asked the question in the headline a week ago, I would have said that whites lived longest; are they not more prosperous than other groups?
I would have been wrong and the correct answer relates strongly to immigration.
First, the numbers on life expectancy according to Wikipedia, for 2018:
- Hispanics: 82.0
- Whites: 78.6
- Blacks: 75.0
Why do Hispanics live longer than whites? Is it genetics? That’s not my field and that may play a part. But what is much more likely is the role played by immigration. Most white and Black residents were born here; many Hispanics were not. Some light on the numbers above is shed by those below from NIH. In 2017 the life expectancies were:
- U.S.-born men: 73.4; women: 79.5
- Foreign-born men: 81.4; women: 85.7
Note that the gap between Hispanics and whites is about three and a half years, while that between native-born men and foreign-born males is eight full years. That’s because a large chunk of the Hispanic population is born in America.
This leaves us with two interesting (and interwoven) questions: What explanation is there for the life expectancy gap between the two groups? And what fiscal consequences, if any, result from these differences.
The argument that more immigration will make the nation younger is blown out of the water by the NIH numbers.
Why the Differences in Life Expectancies?
There may be a rich literature on this point not known to me, but I see two major and one minor reason for the differences:
- The native-born are not a self-selected population — it is everyone born here, strong and weak, the motivated and not-so-motivated. Immigrants are a self-selected population, excluding the weakest.
- A very large percentage of migrants arrive after the first year of life in which the death rate is very high; that cannot be said of the native-born.
- This one holds only for legal immigrants: Our clumsy migration system, and the ceilings on most classes of legal migration, mean that many of them arrive at or near middle-age. The native-born, by definition, all arrive at birth.
The minor but troubling reason is that a few would-be migrants die in their attempts to come to the U.S., leaving a somewhat stronger mix of that population that reaches these shores. Think about the people who die in the Darien Gap, or trying to swim the Rio Grande; the native-born do not face those problems.
What Are the Consequences of All This to Government Costs?
First, we need to say, as my colleague Jason Richwine reminded us recently, “Illegal immigration unambiguously benefits the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, but amnesty (legalization) would reverse those gains and add extra costs.”
This is because far more illegals pay these payroll taxes than receive benefits. But there is a different story with the population of legal immigrants; they pay some payroll taxes and then collect benefits for a much longer time than native-born people.
Using the Social Security standard retirement age as 67, then the native-born men have 6.3 years of benefits and the foreign born have 14.4 years of them. So, the benefits paid to the legal immigrants among foreign-born men continue over more than twice as many years as are paid to native-born men, which probably just about doubles the cost.
With the women, the difference is not quite as great, with the benefit-receiving years being 12.5 years for the natives and 18.7 years for the foreign-born. And since many migrants arrive in their thirties or forties, they have less time to chip into the trust fund. (The author, born in Chicago in 1929, has been paying payroll taxes for 74 years; few migrants can make that claim.)
There is another complication for, at any given time, perhaps 200,000 of the legal migrants. They are in Optional Practical Training status, being new alien graduates of U.S. universities and colleges, and for one year for all of them, and three years for those with STEM backgrounds, their employers do not pay any payroll taxes, with many of the aliens also not paying during this time as well.
No one has figured out how these two factors balance — more taxes than benefits from the illegals and the reverse for the legal ones.
