Are the Boomers to Blame for Illegal Immigration?

They were well-educated enough to appreciate the world beyond their neighborhoods. And since the post war baby boom brought with it the desire and wherewithal to move beyond the cities and farms on which their parents had been raised, they werent afraid of difference or newness.

But then, in addition, an economic expansion fueled, in part by the previous generation's wartime success in Europe and Asia had flattened all the potential economic competition and by their own demographic imperative meant that the bigger houses, yards - and families with children - needed caring for. The boomers themselves weren't too interested and neither were their parents who were raking it in by providing for the rest of the world.

Hence, the demand for immigration of the legal, illegal, quasi-legal and extra-legal variety.

Which provides further evidence to support the proposition that virtually every current societal problem can be blamed on the Boomers. Including the problems they will no doubt leave behind when they die. JL

Francis Wilkinson reports in Bloomberg:

As boomers became wealthier, they had a growing need for low-wage, low-skills labor to help around the house, with the kids, in the yard and in restaurants and low-wage factories.
Meanwhile, expectations of the good life incubated by a long postwar boom had raised the sights of even non-college-educated boomers, unwilling to accept the kind of low-skilled work Prior to the 1960s, the U.S. had not experienced the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. It also had experienced very little illegal immigration. Happenstance?
Tracing our current troubles with illegal immigration  to the source takes us back to that iconic decade of the baby boomers -- the '60s. In 1964, when the Beatles made their American debut on the Ed Sullivan Show, the U.S. ended the Bracero program, which since World War II had enabled millions of Mexican laborers to work in federally-regulated temporary agriculture jobs.
The following year, 1965, produced a major overhaul of U.S. immigration law. Congress discontinued the quota system that had governed legal immigration for decades, and it liberalized restrictions that had kept non-European immigration low.
As immigration law was shifting, baby boomers -- roughly speaking, those born between 1946 and 1964 -- were overtaking American culture. They would soon seize the commanding heights of the economy as well (if not exactly in the way that some of the more radical among them had hoped).
Technology, U.S. global dominance and a population boom powered a dynamic economy and changing social mores. As Marc Rosenblum of the Migration Policy Institute testified to Congress last week, another development "which coincidentally also started in the 1960s, was a long and substantial increase in the drivers of low-skilled migration from Mexico and Central America."
The surge in college education (aided by increased women's enrollment) and the gradual shift from manufacturing to a service economy fostered a large American upper-middle class with unprecedented levels of disposable income. The large-scale movement of boomer women into the workforce generated not only millions of two-earner households, but also increased demand for inexpensive childcare and housework.
As boomers aged and became wealthier, they had a growing need for low-wage, low-skills labor to help around the house, with the kids, in the yard and in the fields, restaurants and low-wage factories.
Meanwhile, expectations of the good life incubated by a long postwar boom had raised the sights of even non-college-educated boomers, many of whom proved unwilling to accept the kind of low-skilled service work that increasingly became identified with immigrants.
"The convergence of strong economic, demographic and social drivers of migration along with a limited number of legal immigration channels immediately produced increasing unauthorized flows," Rosenblum testified.
At the end of the '60s, there were probably fewer than two million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Over the next four decades, that population grew six-fold to serve boomer professionals and business owners. In 1993, boomer President Bill Clinton's successive candidates for U.S. attorney general -- Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood -- each had to withdraw from consideration after disclosures that they had employed undocumented domestic workers.
As the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. grew, so did their integration into the economy. In California, more undocumented immigrants work today in manufacturing and in construction than in agriculture (even though almost a quarter million work in the state's agriculture sector). As any trip to an upscale urban playground confirms, the demand for cheap domestic workers did not fade as boomers became grandparents. It became a fixture of upper-middle-class culture.
Swerving Path to Citizenship
Boomers aren't entirely to blame, of course. Many forces contributed to a large undocumented immigrant population in the U.S., including the 1965 immigration law and subsequent reforms, extended family dynamics and heightened border security that has had the unintended consequence of trapping undocumented immigrants north of an increasingly fortified Rio Grande. But the changes that boomers introduced to the U.S. workforce and culture have earned them a share of the spotlight. They invariably seem to seize it anyway.