Facing Population Reality
Thirty years ago, when I was doing consulting work in Japan (on a 60-day visa), their society was absolutely closed to immigration. They had for centuries blocked anybody from crossing their borders to live and work in Japan. Recently, this has changed significantly due to shifts in their population demographics.
Japan’s population has fallen every year for the last 16 years (and is projected to fall from 125 million to just 87 million by 2060) due to a declining birth rate and a rapidly aging population. Japan needs high skilled immigrants, but has also found they do not have enough construction workers, factory workers, nursing home workers or even laundry workers to sustain their way of life. So (despite some hostile groups of citizens), they were painfully forced to modify a centuries-old anti-immigration policy that doesn’t make sense today.
Sound familiar?
Are you aware that today, more than 25 percent of America’s doctors are foreign-born, including our own cardiologist with an office here in Versailles? Think about getting a quick appointment if we had 25 percent fewer doctors. If you think food prices are high now, wait until the people who harvest our vegetables, milk our cows and work in our meatpacking plants disappear.
Some say immigrants are taking away jobs from willing Americans. How many out-of-work coal miners in Eastern Kentucky, or auto workers in Flint, Michigan, are going to move to California to pick lettuce or South Dakota to cut meat in a packing plant? You’re right…. none.
As we baby boomers retire, we are soon going to realize that there aren’t enough people to clean our rooms in the nursing home. Even today, hiring a cleaning lady at a reasonable price…is not easy.
We Americans need to look around us and consider the reality of our demographics. We have a huge aging population and a low birth rate, just like Japan, and the problems they’re facing today are going to hit us even harder in about 30 years.
We need a national immigration policy to supply the specific work skills we need to keep America strong and growing. Some workers will need to be highly skilled doctors, scientists and computer geeks, etc. But others will need to be hard-working folks who are willing to do the dirty jobs that Americans seem unwilling to take. Maybe we need a guest worker program like so many countries utilize. Are you aware that today, many of our hospitals are recruiting nurses from foreign countries due to an extreme shortage of American nurses?
America cannot afford to be like the guy who waits until the roads are icy and impassable and the pipes freeze to fill his propane tank. We need a thoughtful, forward-looking, reality-based immigration plan (not just a patchwork of lobbyists’ wishes). Japan waited too long. We haven’t had a modernized strategic immigration plan for 40 years. As citizens, we need to demand that our legislators do their job… now!
Edd Roggenkamp
Versailles