When immigrant children are under siege, so is the future of elderly white people

Aug. 01--Whenever talk turns to education, the conversation should be rooted in hope and not fear.

But the opposite happened in Memphis recently.

Because the Trump administration has unleashed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Latino immigrants like a bloodhound, many are too frightened to register their children for the upcoming school year.

They fear their children will be used to track them or others down -- and subject them to deportation if they failed to get all their i's dotted or their t's crossed on their immigration forms, or for some long-ago infraction.

Brian Stockton, chief of staff for Shelby County schools, tried to assuage immigrants' fears. Standing in a spot in East Memphis where many were arrested recently, he said that the school system does not share personal information with outside agencies, nor does it require parents to have legal status to register children, nor does it share Social Security numbers or other details.

Yet immigrants, whose children make up 12 percent of the school population, shouldn't be the only ones scared here.

The aging, mostly-white population -- here and around the nation -- that will need immigrant children working and paying into Medicare and Social Security should be afraid also. But those children won't be able to do that if their parents are too scared to send them to school.

This isn't a matter of opinion as much as it's a matter of math.

In 2016, the U.S. had the smallest rate of population growth in any year since the Great Depression. That year, the population grew by 0.695 percent, registering the lowest growth rate since 1938, when it was 0.60 percent.

Most of the decline had to do with more people dying than being born, and in a third of the states, more white people are dying than are being born.

In Tennessee, slightly more white people are being born than are dying.

As Baby Boomers continue to age, that trend is expected to continue -- which is why demographers such as William Frey of the Brookings Institution, as well as others, say that the attention in the U.S. should turn to investing in immigrants, most of whom are younger and who must power a labor force that many people are leaving.

But since xenophobia is a bigger sell for the Trump administration than math or practicality or hope, then it's likely that the raids will persist. And if they force immigrants to keep their children out of school, well, then, that means a chunk of new Americans won't be able to support the old ones.

That makes no sense.

"Americans have been in deep denial about the growth rate of our country," said Nat Irvin II, a futurist and the Woodrow M. Strickler Executive in Residence, Professor of Management Practice, College of Business at the University of Louisville.

"We simply don't pay attention to these things. We're stuck in this time warp, looking at the U.S. as if it was still in the 1950s. But the fact is that we're going to have 58 million more Baby Boomers who are going to be out of here, out of the workforce."

Another irony, Irvin said, is if the children of immigrants aren't educated, and they can't get jobs, then the older people who they would normally support by paying into the system could wind up supporting them.

There's also another irony -- and tragedy.

White people aged 55 and older overwhelmingly supported Trump in the presidential election -- and many supported him because of his anti-Latino and anti-Muslim rhetoric, as well as his pledge to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico. The ICE raids, as well as attempts at immigration bans, are all part of Trump's and their vision of the America they want.

But that America no longer exists, and the tragedy is that a lot of old white people will wind up suffering if immigrants and their children continue to be painted as their enemies, when they may well be their salvation.

"The real problem here is that we don't like the way the immigrants look," Irvin said. "When there were more Europeans coming, we were happy... But every generation or so we get an influx of immigrants, and we forget that we're a nation of immigrants.

"But the math never forgets."

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