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BOOK REVIEW |
Associate Professor of Government Claremont McKenna College Claremont, CA 91711
Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, by Dowell Myers. Russell Sage Press, New York, 2007, 356 pp., $35.00 (cloth).
The Baby Boomers Grow Up: Contemporary Perspectives on Midlife, edited by Susan Krauss Whitbourne and Sherry L. Willis. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 340 pp., $34.50 (paper).
In the late 1990s, Brookings Institution scholar William Frey (1996, and Frey & DeVol, 2000) was one of the first to forecast that twenty-first century America would be shaped by two powerful demographic forces: the aging of the baby boom and immigration. The dialectic between largely white, aging baby boomers and a younger, far more ethnically diverse Global America (to use Frey's phrasing) will likely constitute the nation's central political drama during the first half of the twenty-first century. The process could be relatively peaceful or it could dissolve into economic and political polarization a la the dark, dystopian vision offered in the science fiction classic Blade Runner. This specter of a crowded urban nightmare, deeply divided along a triple race-class-age demographic divide, silently haunts the increasingly sharp, contemporary debates over legal and illegal immigration. The dilemma for contemporary researchers is how to assess soberly the full range of prospects regarding the rendez-vous of aging boomers and demographic change without running afoul of "diversity is our strength" ideology and happy talk.
The topic of aging baby boomers is only now gaining public and professional attention and is not—yet—politicized. On the other hand, candid discussion and analyses of immigration have long been compromised by politically-correct pressures to avoid racial stereotypes, positively portray ethnic minorities, celebrate diversity, and adamantly support affirmative action policies. The latter, originally designed in the 1960s to remedy past discrimination against Blacks, have since expanded to include immigrant minorities along with an ambitious new goal: to make American institutions proportionately represent and look like the nation's changing demographics.
Furthermore, immigration issues are increasingly shaped by competing, class-based worldviews. On the one hand, many of America's elites favor an internationalist, multicultural outlook congruent with global markets and high immigration levels. This post-American viewpoint assumes the nation state, its borders, and national identities are passé. On the other hand, many middle and working class citizens remain wedded to an older worldview rooted in American exceptionalism, economic and cultural nationalism, individual initiative and responsibility, local churches and communities, family values, and assimilation of limited numbers of legal immigrants.
Recent analyses suggest that racial, class, and age inequalities are coalescing. The U.S. Census Bureau (2007) recently confirmed William Frey's original forecasts of an emerging racial generation gap comprised of older, slower-growing, non-Hispanic Whites and a younger Global America that is increasingly Hispanic and Asian. The economic disparities of this racial generation gap have been suggested by a USA Today analysis of Federal Reserve data that found a growing wealth gap between younger and older Americans (Cauchon, 2007). And an age-adjusted earnings gap was indicated in a study by The Economic Mobility Project (2007) which found that thirty-year-old males today earn less, in inflation-adjusted wages, than did thirty-year-old men during the 1970s.
California Forebodings
Political clashes over immigration and the rumbling of this age-race-class sociological fault line are most apparent in bellwether California. That state is the focus of Boomers and Immigrants: Forging a New Social Contract for the Future of America, by Dowell Myers, a University of Southern California professor of planning and development.
Myers hopes to chart a middle path through what he admits is a politically polarized landscape. His first task is to correct what he sees as a major perceptual lag. The California public assumes that legal and illegal immigration are continuing to surge. But the reality is that immigration has subsided into the second of three distinctive demographic phases—a pattern that the rest of the nation is replicating on a delayed basis.
The first stage of California's demographic transformation from 1970 to the mid-1990s was indeed marked by a rapid increase in the number of legal and illegal Third World immigrants (following 1965 Congressional changes in immigration formulae) and also accompanied by a decline in the birthrate of native-born citizens. During the second phase of demographic change, 1995–2010, the source of state population growth has shifted to the higher birthrates of resident immigrants; new immigration from Latin America and Asia has slowed (thus, in 1990, California was home to an estimated 45 percent of the nation's unauthorized immigrants; today that figure has declined to an estimated 24 percent). The third phase of demographic change will occur between 2010 and 2039 when California will be challenged to fully incorporate this new but largely settled immigrant population into its political and social structure (California still leads all other states with its 27 percent of foreign-born share of population; the White, non-Hispanic population has fallen below 45 percent of total population, and 30 percent of public school children).
Myers' primary worry is the continuing disjuncture between the younger non-White demographic majority and older White political majority. The clash over taxing and spending began during the 1970s when the initial surge of largely poor immigrants was met by massive cutbacks in public services and infrastructure forced by Proposition 13, the hugely popular tax-cutting initiative. In addition to slashing property taxes, the measure set up a 2/3 legislative or voter supermajority for future tax increases—further ensuring the continuing dominance of the White electorate perhaps until 2030. In 1994, insult was added to injury when a wide range of voting groups (except Latinos) passed Proposition 194, an initiative denying public services to illegal immigrants (a measure subsequently voided in the courts).
Myers candidly describes the state's simmering political crisis—something few others want to do publicly: "In California the older voters remember the past, appear to vote in reaction to its loss and are more pessimistic about the future. ... many white voters object to the arrival of immigrants and the ethnic changes they create, and as a result a substantial number are disinvesting in education for the next generation as well as withdrawing support from other tax-supported investments" (p. 149).
Thus, after the 1980s, the Golden State's luminous image faded drastically and California skipped a generation in public investment. The implications for future racial politics are stark and uncomfortable: "The racial justice issue, it could be said, is that the generation skipping its payments is largely white, while the generation being asked to cover the deferred obligations and play catch-up is Latino, Asian and African American. This fact may not sit well once it is recognized" (p. 191).
The relationship between immigration, diversity and social solidarity is sensitive social science territory. After years of gathering data and very carefully analyzing it, Robert Putnam recently published cross-cultural findings of an inverse relationship between ethnic diversity and social solidarity and social capital (2007). Myers offers a similar diagnosis on California's fractured social consensus: "What is missing in California and the United States today is an organized sense of unified purpose—a broadly accepted common social understanding that establishes a positive vision of the future and appeals to both the struggling new generation and the more advantaged voter majority" (p. 153).
To cure these deep divisions, Myers prescribes a new social contract emphasizing collective protection and services similar to the consensus in two previous eras: the New Deal-World War II period, and the postwar social contract emphasizing middle-class entitlements. The current social contract of limited government—growing out of California's Proposition 13—favors aging Whites, "the advantaged generation that is striving to maintain its middle-class entitlement and now has claimed the ever-growing rewards of seniors" (p. 193).
A new social contract must be built upon recognition of mutual interests by aging Whites and younger immigrants. Myers contends that California and the rest of the nation need the higher birthrates of immigrants to stabilize the ongoing demographic transition of lower birth-rates for citizens combined with rapid aging of the population. California and the nation are headed for a drastic slowdown in workforce and employment growth. Myers draws upon a variety of statistical models to persuade older Whites that it is in their best interests to invest in younger Global America to create a skilled, middle class workforce and taxpayer base that can afford to purchase aging boomers' real estate.
Myers makes a substantial contribution to the professional literature on social mobility through his use of census data to demonstrate immigrants' substantial economic progress: the longer an immigrant cohort has been in this country, the lower its rate of poverty and the higher its rate of home ownership. "Although many of these immigrants continue to lag behind the achievements of native-born white residents and more needs to be done to cultivate their advancement, their revealed progress is much greater than we have been led to expect" (p. 119). But these optimistic findings are tempered by the finding that educational mobility remains a weakness.
Boosting educational mobility of immigrants and their children means much greater funding for schools. By many measures, California has fallen to the bottom of state education rankings. Once again, this runs into the legacy of Proposition 13 and the political gulf on taxing and spending between young ethnic populations and older White voters. Myers cites recent polling data showing that nearly 68 percent of Latino voters, but only 38.6 percent of White voters favored higher taxes and more services over lower taxes and fewer services (there is some reduction in this gap when controlling for income, education and trust in government).
In proposing his new social contract and other bromides about mutual generational cooperation, I suspect Myers may have spent too much time with fellow academics and not enough in a real world that is more polarized on these issues than he realizes. Myers' general diagnosis is apt. But deeper understanding of the history and complexity of immigration's wide-ranging impact upon California can be gained from other books such as Peter Schrag's California: America's High Stakes Experiment (2006)—which Myers occasionally cites—and Victor Davis Hansen's Mexifornia (2005)—which he doesn't.
Myers and others like him must far better understand California's working and middle classes as well as the populist response to immigration and the drive for globalization by the nation's economic and political elites. As Myers recognizes, California's long populist tradition was reborn with Proposition 13 in 1978; but it has continued to achieve other victories—notably the recall of Governor Gray Davis and the election of Arnold Schwarzenegger. These new populists are furious over nearly three decades of high-level neglect, accommodation, and censorship (by top politicians as well as national and local news outlets—especially The Los Angeles Times) of legal and illegal immigration's extraordinary toll on California's public services, infrastructure and overall quality of life—especially via crowding and the growth of increasingly internationalized streets, prisons, and drug gangs.
Myers totally ignores the ill will generated by the entanglement of immigrant minorities with affirmative action preferences, and that California's new populist movement put an end to public-sector ethnic preferences in 1996 through passage of Proposition 209. Eleven years later, in the summer of 2007, this same populist movement—now surging nationwide—burned out Congressional telephone systems in shutting down a massive immigration reform bill being rushed through the U.S. Senate by a bipartisan coalition backed by the Bush White House.
Whether Myers likes it or not, the largely White, middle class, aging baby boomers powering this new populism will have to be won over if California's infrastructure is to be rebuilt through a new social contract. The greater danger is that they will cash out and leave, rather than pay higher taxes to invest in the new immigrants and their children. Indeed, Myers is well aware of the ebb and flow of diversity flight (to use Frey's term) from California to other states during the past 15 years. He is also very much aware that baby boomers are anxiously contemplating their inflated real estate values. But he fails to foresee how the two trends might come together in a potential stampede of panic selling if the first wave of retiring baby boomers decide they'd better "get while the getting's good," before others think to do the same.
Snapshots of the Boomers
But who are these aging baby boomers—and what is happening to them as they move through mid-life? That is the question addressed by contributors to The Baby Boomers Grow Up: Contemporary Perspectives on Midlife edited by Susan Krauss Whitbourne and Sherry L. Willis. For scholars interested in public policy, the book's subtitle sometimes seems more apt insofar as several of the more psychologically-oriented chapters are more generally focused upon mid-life developmental concepts (control, stress, cognitive functioning, menopause) and supplemented by limited and sometimes inconclusive data on baby boomers.
The book nonetheless opens with two very competent chapters by David J. Eggebeen and Samuel Sturgeon on baby boomers' demographic characteristics and by Abigail J. Stewart and Cynthia M. Torges on how social, historical and developmental factors influenced boomer's psychology. Not many surprises for people familiar with popular and professional studies, though some of the data presented on income inequalities were eye-opening. For example, 27 percent of older White boomers had a family income of $100,000 or more (10% of older Black boomer families); and among all boomer families with two full-time earners, 43% had an income above $100,000.
Some very important conceptual and methodological problems in boomer studies are raised in the book's third chapter, Duane F. Alwin, Ryan J. McCammon, and Scott M. Hofer. Research on boomers is often fraught with conceptual confusion, mixing cohort (people born during a specific time period who share the experience of the life cycle), cohort effects (individual change produced by the unique intersection of biography and history), generation (when cohorts become collective actors who jointly construct social reality and share a distinctive culture or identity), aging and life cycle dynamics (common to all individuals), and period effects (when all members of a society respond to and are affected by historical events or processes such as war, disaster, or economic depression). The related methodological question is precise measurement and isolation of factors contributing to individual change using standard research designs.
A chapter on mental health indicators is rich with boomer-relevant data. Jennifer R. Piazza and Susan Charles find that "despite increases in the standard of living, advances in the second half of the twentieth century have not translated into improved psychological well-being for the Baby Boomers in comparison to their predecessors." Baby Boomers report lower levels of happiness and have higher rates of several psychological disorders (depression, anxiety disorders, substance abuse and dependence, alcohol problems) when compared to older adults. On the other hand, when compared to younger adults, they are, on most indices, relatively more advantaged Growing old is associated with changes in perspective that lead to improvements in well-being. Baby boomers are better educated and will have access to social and medical advances unavailable to previous generations. Greater numbers may have led to greater stress but may also lead to greater awareness of mental health needs of older adults. But the chapter confirms darker findings on the "bowling alone" generation: among boomers there is more alienation, isolation, and decreased ties to the larger community.
The final contributions in The Baby Boomers Grow Up examine boomers' close relationships with parents, siblings, and others. Most boomers' ties to their parents remain strong, despite major economic changes, geographical mobility and proliferation of diverse family structures. This suggests that a certain degree of change has been and will continue to be "normalized" in parent-child relationships. Data on other mid-life relationships are scarce and often dated, but boomers appear to retain an average of about 7 friends; there are considerable variations in relationships with siblings, from close to distant. Boomer women averaged having fewer than 2.0 children compared to their parents' average of 3.6; thus, boomers postponed having children, have fewer of them and have fewer grandchildren. Surprisingly, however, they become grandparents at a relatively young average age of 45. A chapter by Sara J. Czaja on aging boomers in the workplace echoes several recent reports that boomers will likely work longer than previous generations and will seek more flexible working arrangements such as increased part-time and telecommuting opportunities. The chapter emphasizes changing workplace technologies and the need for organizations and policymakers to focus upon training and re-training. Boomers are the most highly-educated generation in history and most can adapt to rapid workplace technology changes. But inevitable age-related losses in hearing, vision cognitive and motor-skills will reduce their facility and speed in learning new technologies. (Whether the quickening pace of technological change will lead to an increase in age discrimination is a shoe that doesn't drop here.)
Future research on aging baby boomers should be multidisciplinary and recognize the many complexities and subgroups among this vast generation. In that regard, it would be fruitful to combine the insights of Whitbourne's and Willis' contributors on how boomers are changing and being changed by midlife passages and Myers' focus upon boomers' response to immigration in order to better study an emerging boomer politics. Aging boomers' changing economic fortunes as they near retirement may prove most decisive. Will they cooperate in a creating a new social contract, such as Myers proposes, or will they withdraw to gated retirement enclaves and fiercely fight to protect and expand retirement entitlement above all competing demands?
References
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