Beacon Journal/Ohio.com editorial board: An aging country needs younger immigrants

Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats had the much better bill. Their response to the humanitarian crisis at the southwestern border included provisions that would address more precisely the concerns driven by recent reports about migrant children confined to cells, wearing filthy clothes, sleeping on concrete floors and often going hungry. These are the conditions at facilities run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The sickening feeling deepened with publication of that wrenching AP photograph of a father and daughter, face down in the water, dead, having tried to cross the Rio Grande.

What Pelosi and colleagues lacked was sufficient political muscle to prevail. Republicans control the Senate and the White House. Thus, the speaker agreed to take up the bipartisan legislation that cleared the Senate, which is designed to win the signature of President Trump, whose approach to immigration has fueled so much ugliness at the border.

Both bills included $4.6 million in emergency humanitarian aid. The Senate focused more on accelerating the processing of migrants, many with asylum claims. Its version does bar the Department of Homeland Security from adding beds at detention centers, a step viewed as seeking to curb the White House crackdown. The Senate also requires authorities to permit congressional visits to facilities housing unaccompanied children with two days' notice.

How was the House version better? It required the release of unaccompanied children from temporary facilities after three months. It allowed for congressional visits without notice. Most important, it called for Customs and Border Protection to establish plans and procedures to ensure children and adults in detention receive through trained personnel adequate medical care, nutrition and hygiene. These requirements hardly seem out of line.

If anything, they are appropriate given the contemptible practices of the administration from expanded family separation to the lies about its policies and actions.

The clash between the House and Senate serves as another reminder of the country's inability to have a reasoned conversation about immigration, let alone reach the obvious compromise -- improved border security combined with a path to legal status, or citizenship, for undocumented immigrants long here and productively so. That failure to give and take has aggravated the current crisis. The president, more than anyone else, has posed a problem with his frequent plays to fear and division.

What belongs front and center in the discussion is something highlighted recently by William Frey of the Brookings Institution. He argues the country isn't "full," contrary to the president's claim. Rather, as he explains, it "is sputtering from historic demographic stagnation," with the lowest population growth rate in 80 years.

Projections show the population of children increasing less than 2 percent per decade from 2010 to 2050. For seniors, the growth per decade averages 21.5 percent. We're getting older. So much so that by 2035, Frey adds, there will be more seniors than children for the first time in the nation's history.

Who will fill the gap, providing a source of population gain and adding vitality to the economy? One answer is young immigrants, often from Latin America and Asia. That is what cities mean when they present themselves as "welcoming" communities. Americans have a national interest in seeing a healthy flow of immigration. Consider the contribution to Social Security and Medicare, working immigrants helping to support retirement programs for an expanding cohort of seniors.

A significant piece of the country's immigration problem involves the unintended consequences of the landmark 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act. That fallout long has been ripe for review. It matters, too, that the country face up to the demographic truth and what it requires. Again, immigration is positioned to renew and enhance our lives.

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