In the political-economy debate people express the idea that immigrants are good because they can help pay for the old, thus help sustaining the social security system. In addition, the median voter whose income derives from wages will wish to keep out the immigrants who will depress his/her wage. Therefore the decisive voter will keep migrants out. The paper addresses these two accepted propositions. For this purpose we develop an OLG political economy model of social security and migration to explore how migration policy and a pay-as-you-go (PAYG) social security system are jointly determined. The sub-game perfect Markov , depends on the different patterns of fertility rates among native born and migrants. Our analysis demonstrates that a social security system may change the first proposition significantly because the median voter may opt to bring in migrants to help him/her during retirement. As for the second proposition we get a significantly nuanced version. Not always immigration helps sustain the social security.

The Social Security system is underfunded, in part due to demographic challenges. Because the system is pay-as-you-go—meaning current workers support current beneficiaries—the combination of increasing life expectancies and stagnant birth rates is placing real strain on the system, which is scheduled to become insolvent by 2034, absent policy changes. Immigration, while not a silver bullet, can mitigate this challenge by providing additional workers to support the growing ranks of retirees. Immigrants to the United States tend to be of working age on arrival, which means they can begin contributing to the Social Security system as soon as they begin working. Immigrants also tend to consume fewer benefits than the native-born population, including fewer Social Security benefits. These two factors make increased immigration a powerful policy tool in the effort to maintain the Social Security program.

The lore of the immigrant who comes to the United States to take advantage of our welfare system has a long history in America's collective mythology, but it has little basis in fact. The so-called problem of immigrants on the dole was nonetheless a major concern of the 1996 welfare reform law, the impact of which is still playing out today. While legal immigrants continue to pay taxes and are eligible for the draft, welfare reform has severely limited their access to government supports in times of crisis. Edited by Michael Fix, Immigrants and Welfare rigorously assesses the welfare reform law, questions whether its immigrant provisions were ever really necessary, and examines its impact on legal immigrants' ability to integrate into American society. Immigrants and Welfare draws on fields from demography and law to developmental psychology. The first part of the volume probes the politics behind the welfare reform law, its legal underpinnings, and what it may mean for integration policy. Contributor Ron Haskins makes a case for welfare reform's ultimate success but cautions that excluding noncitizen children (future workers) from benefits today will inevitably have serious repercussions for the American economy down the road. Michael Wishnie describes the implications of the law for equal protection of immigrants under the U.S. Constitution. The second part of the book focuses on empirical research regarding immigrants' propensity to use benefits before the law passed, and immigrants' use and hardship levels afterwards. Jennifer Van Hook and Frank Bean analyze immigrants' benefit use before the law was passed in order to address the contested sociological theories that immigrants are inclined to welfare use and that it slows their assimilation. Randy Capps, Michael Fix, and Everett Henderson track trends before and after welfare reform in legal immigrants' use of the major federal benefit programs affected by the law. Leighton Ku looks specifically at trends in food stamps and Medicaid use among noncitizen children and adults and documents the declining health insurance coverage of noncitizen parents and children. Finally, Ariel Kalil and Danielle Crosby use longitudinal data from Chicago to examine the health of children in immigrant families that left welfare. Even though few states took the federal government's invitation with the 1996 welfare reform law to completely freeze legal immigrants out of the social safety net, many of the law's most far-reaching provisions remain in place and have significant implications for immigrants. Immigrants and Welfare takes a balanced look at the politics and history of immigrant access to safety-net supports and the ongoing impacts of welfare. Copublished with the Migration Policy Institute

Since 1965 the foreign-born population of the United States has swelled from 9.6 million or 5 percent of the population to 45 million or 14 percent in 2015. Today, about one-quarter of the U.S. population consists of immigrants or the children of immigrants. Given the sizable representation of immigrants in the U.S. population, their health is a major influence on the health of the population as a whole. On average, immigrants are healthier than native-born Americans. Yet, immigrants also are subject to the systematic marginalization and discrimination that often lead to the creation of health disparities. To explore the link between immigration and health disparities, the Roundtable on the Promotion of Health Equity held a workshop in Oakland, California, on November 28, 2017. This summary of that workshop highlights the presentations and discussions of the workshop.

The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration finds that the long-term impact of immigration on the wages and employment of native-born workers overall is very small, and that any negative impacts are most likely to be found for prior immigrants or native-born high school dropouts. First-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born, but the second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S. This report concludes that immigration has an overall positive impact on long-run economic growth in the U.S. More than 40 million people living in the United States were born in other countries, and almost an equal number have at least one foreign-born parent. Together, the first generation (foreign-born) and second generation (children of the foreign-born) comprise almost one in four Americans. It comes as little surprise, then, that many U.S. residents view immigration as a major policy issue facing the nation. Not only does immigration affect the environment in which everyone lives, learns, and works, but it also interacts with nearly every policy area of concern, from jobs and the economy, education, and health care, to federal, state, and local government budgets. The changing patterns of immigration and the evolving consequences for American society, institutions, and the economy continue to fuel public policy debate that plays out at the national, state, and local levels. The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration assesses the impact of dynamic immigration processes on economic and fiscal outcomes for the United States, a major destination of world population movements. This report will be a fundamental resource for policy makers and law makers at the federal, state, and local levels but extends to the general public, nongovernmental organizations, the business community, educational institutions, and the research community.

Abstract: For each year of work under the Social Security System, immigrants realize higher benefits than U.S. born, even when their earnings are identical in all years the immigrant has been in the U.S. Two features of the social security benefit calculation are responsible: the social security benefit formula transfers benefits toward those with low lifetime covered earnings, and all years an immigrant spends outside the US are treated as years of zero income. Immigrants with high earnings who have worked in the U.S. for only a 10-20 years benefit most from these procedures. If instead earnings were averaged only over the years an immigrant resides in the U.S., and benefits prorated immigrants would receive the same return on their social security taxes as US born who have the same earnings in each year. It is difficult to justify the current procedures determining benefits for immigrants on the basis of income or wealth differences between US and foreign born. Among HHRS respondents, mean total wealth of immigrants is 92% of the mean total wealth of US born, while the mean income of immigrants exceeds the mean income of US born by 3%. But income and wealth are less evenly distributed among foreign born than US born. Depending on whether the appropriate period for calculating benefits is taken to be 35 or 40 years, prorating would reduce the present value of benefit payments to the cohort of immigrants born from 1932-1941 (91% of the HRS cohort) by $7.5 billion or $15 billion respectively. The 1932-1941 cohort represents 1/7 of all foreign born who are now 25-64. We also ask whether, from a selfish financial viewpoint, US born participants would have preferred to have immigrants from the HRS cohort included in social security. The answer is yes. Despite their better deal, most immigrants in the HRS cohort will pay more in taxes than they will receive in benefits, although just barely.