Report: America’s Demographic Decline Threatens Economic Growth - Could 'Heartland Visas' Help?

A new report by the Economic Innovation Group finds that slowing growth in the U.S. working age population threatens to undercut future growth of the American economy.

The report offered the following warning:

“Population growth has slowed, the number of prime working age people is stagnating, and the country is aging rapidly. These trends have raised concerns that the United States will soon face the serious demographic problems that Japan and parts of Western Europe have confronted in recent decades. The truth is, for many parts of the country, including much of the heartland, those challenges have already arrived. Over the last decade, Japan’s population shrank by 1% and its prime working age population shrank by 4.4%. Across the United States, 41% of counties, with a population of 38 million, have declined by this much or more over the last decade.”

Data from our partners at USAFacts, a non-partisan civic data initiative, underscores those points. America’s median age has risen from 30 years old in 1980 to 38 years old in 2017, and while the employment rate among prime working age adults (ages 16-64) has remained relatively flat over the last three decades, the rate of employment among elderly workers (ages 65+) is the highest it's been since 1960.

To address this, the authors of the Economic Innovation Group report propose the adoption of place-based visas (or “Heartland visas”), which would enable skilled immigrants to move to eligible communities suffering from demographic decline that opt-in to hosting visa holders. Those visa holders would “provide a much-needed injection of human capital and entrepreneurial vitality into parts of the country that retain considerable economic potential.”

— Eric Revell

(Photo Credit: iStock.com / GM Stock Films)