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Immigration and the Regional Demographics of the Elderly Population in the United States

^a Population Program, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Boulder

Andrei Rogers, Population Program, Institute of Behavioral Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, CO 80309-0484 E-mail: andrei.rogers{at}colorado.edu.

	Abstract

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Objectives

This research examined the impacts of past international and interregional migration flows on regional elderly population growth and distribution patterns.

Methods

The authors used 1960, 1970, 1980, and 1990 Census data and multiregional demographic models to analyze changes in the sources of regional elderly population growth rates, age compositions, and spatial distributions over time.

Results.

Past elderly interregional migration patterns have exhibited considerable stability and have contributed less than aging-in-place in shaping regional elderly population geographies. Also the effects of immigration on elderly dependency ratios have been very modest.

Discussion.

Little evidence exists of any significant breaks with past trends in internal elderly migration patterns. Reconstruction of elderly population changes between 1950 and 1990 reveals that the driving force behind the changes was net aging-in-place and not net migration. Finally, analysis of the possible population rejuvenating effects of immigration suggests that although its impact has contributed to lower elderly-to-worker dependency ratios, its level over the past decades has been insufficient to counteract the much stronger countervailing impact of population aging.

IN a perceptive, now decade-old, article in this journal, Golant 1990 examined how three aspects of the U.S. elderly population's migration patterns changed over the three decades from 1955 to 1985, focusing in particular on levels, spatial patterns, and net migration totals. Finding several discontinuities from past trends in the 1980–85 data, Golant wondered whether these declines heralded new long-term conditions and ended his article with a call for studies of subsequent periods to establish or deny the persistence of the "new" elderly migration spatial structure. In this article, we respond to Golant's call by turning to the 1990 Census data on migration and asking the question whether a new post-1980 elderly interregional migration spatial structure has evolved.

Golant 1990 focused on internal migration and did not consider the usually more significant contribution of "aging-in-place" to elderly migration growth and settlement patterns (Rogers and Woodward 1988; Rogerson 1996). In this article we do, and as our second question ask whether it was migration or aging-in-place that was driving regional elderly population growth during the 40 years from 1950 to 1990.

Finally, we conclude by considering the impacts of the heightened immigration of foreign-born persons since the reforms of 1965 and ask how these newcomers affected elderly dependency ratios in the past.

These three questions and our answers to them constitute the core of this article. In it we emphasize a disaggregation of the U.S. population into foreign-born and native-born subpopulations, because of the heterogeneity in their respective migration patterns. Consequently, before addressing the previously listed questions, we describe the historical immigration context within which the principal demographic processes took place.

	Historical Context

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The elderly population of the United States has assumed ever larger shares of the total national population during the past century. Whereas persons aged 60 years and older constituted about 6% of the national population in 1900, they accounted for about 16% of that population at the century's end. Driving this march toward an older population have been the remarkable increases in average life expectancy (from 47 years in 1900 to 76 years in 2000) and corresponding decreases in the birthrate (from 32 per 1,000 to about 15 per 1,000).

The temporal pattern for the foreign-born elderly population during this same period, however, has been quite different. The 20th century began with immigrants accounting for 30.9% of the elderly (aged 60 years and older) population and for 13.6% of the total U.S. population (Fig. 1 and Table 1 ). The century ended with these two percentages taking on close to identical values: about 9.9% and 9.5%, respectively. The dynamics that have produced this evolution over the past century are particularly interesting because of particular immigration laws passed by the federal government over the past century—laws that collectively have influenced immigration numbers and compositions.

View larger version (23K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 1. Percentage foreign born of elderly and total populations: 1900–2000.

View larger version (20K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 2. Age compositions by nativity: 1900–2000. Data are from Rogers, Little, and Raymer 1999.

View larger version (28K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 3. Spatial concentrations: Percentage distributions of elderly (aged 60 years and older) foreign-born and native-born populations, by region: 1900, 1950, and 2000.

View larger version (26K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 4. Decadal total and elderly (aged 60 years and older) growth rates, by nativity: 1900–2000.

In addition to the differences by nativity observed for the elderly population in the United States, substantial regional variations also developed over time (Fig. 5). The elderly foreign-born populations of the South and West regions increased in size during the entire 20th century. Moreover, the South showed no major declines in annual growth rates between 1940 and 1970, such as occurred in the other three regions.

View larger version (25K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 5. Decadal regional elderly (aged 60 years and older) growth rates, by nativity: 1900–2000.

The race/ethnic composition of U.S. immigrants was significantly altered by the immigration reforms introduced by federal legislation passed in 1965. A major feature of the Immigration and Nationality Act amendments of 1965 was that the number of immediate family members of U.S. citizens eligible for immigration was no longer subject to numerical limits. A consequence of this provision was a dramatic increase in immigration from Asian and Latin American countries. With this increase came a sharp decrease in immigration from Europe and Canada. Whereas almost two thirds of all immigrants to the United States during the 1950s originated in these two regions, by the 1990s, their contribution dropped to 14%. At the same time, Asia, which contributed only 6% in the 1950s, increased its share to 44% in the 1980s, and immigration from Latin America increased from 26% in the 1950s to 40% in the 1960s, a share that it has maintained since then (Smith and Edmonston 1997).

	Data and Methods: Identifying the Sources of Elderly Population Growth, 1950–1990

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Data: Analyzing Internal Migration Patterns
The 1940 Census was the first national census count to report origin-destination-specific migration flow data for the United States. Already by that time, elderly migrants were moving to the Sunbelt and exhibiting the two major national "migration sheds" identified by Friedsam 1951(p. 238):

concerning the major directions of the migration of the aged, the observation can be made that in general terms migration to the Pacific region comes in large part from west of the Mississippi while most of that to the South Atlantic comes from east of the Mississippi.

Elderly migration patterns since the 1940 Census most often have been studied with the question regarding the respondent's location of residence 5 years earlier. (The sole exception was the 1950 Census, which adopted a 1-year interval instead to avoid the immediate post-World War II period of readjustment.) Thus, Golant 1990, for example, focused on the elderly migration patterns in the periods 1955–60, 1965–70, 1975–80, and 1980–85. Although the data from the first three time periods came from the decennial census, the data for the fourth time period were obtained from the published report of the U.S. Current Population Survey. But, as Golant 1990 pointed out, the 1980–85 data set therefore is based on a very much smaller sample (less than 0.1% of all U.S. households).

Specific interregional migration origin-destination streams (allocated to three regions) are thus likely to include average sample sizes of about 20 households. Consequently, the migration samples for most of the reported analyses are extremely small. (Golant 1990, p. 136)

We believe that Golant rightly stressed that the findings regarding 1980–85 migration patterns should be interpreted cautiously because of the very small sample size of the data set, and we therefore turned to the 1990 Census to see whether the discontinuity found by Golant persisted or not. Like Golant, we reallocated the migrants in each of the time periods back to their regions of origin of 5 years earlier. Thus, the at-risk population of migrating from any region is the population who lived there 5 years earlier. Unlike Golant, however, we set a younger age threshold to define the elderly population, namely, those aged 60 years and older instead of the more conventional 65 years and older. We did this, first, to increase the sample size; second, to recognize that most married men who migrate at retirement take along a younger wife; and third, to acknowledge the trend toward earlier retirement.

Finally, we disaggregated the elderly population into native-born and foreign-born subpopulations by separating those who were born in the United States and its territories (or born abroad to at least one American parent) from those who were not. For our projection exercises we obtained the necessary input data on mortality, fertility, and migration from the standard Vital Statistics and Census Bureau sources. Where necessary (e.g., the case of emigration) we used conventional methods of indirect estimation. For details, the reader should consult Rogers and colleagues 1999 and Rogers and Raymer 1999a.

Models: The Multiregional Demographics of Elderly Population Growth
To identify in greater detail the demographic sources of regional increases or decreases in the elderly population, we have developed an exercise in quantitative historical demography: the reconstruction of the regional demographic dynamics of the elderly foreign-born and native-born populations in the United States from 1950 to 2000. (Inadequate data on internal migration prevents us from going back to 1900.) These estimated dynamics will help us to answer a number of interesting questions about the evolutions of these elderly populations during the last half of the 20th century. Our method uses an "open" multiregional projection model framework (Rogers 1995) to identify the contributions to regional population growth made by each of the principal demographic components of change: fertility, mortality, international migration (immigration and emigration), and internal migration (in-migration and out-migration). In an earlier article (Rogers et al. 1999) we described this framework in some detail and used it to illuminate the demographics of the total (not elderly) U.S. multiregional population.

Using data drawn largely from the U.S. Census Bureau's published and unpublished records, including various Public Use Microdata Sample (PUMS and IPUMS) files of the Censuses of Population, we developed an empirical multiregional projection model that begins with the population counts for each age group in each region that are reported by a decadal census at time t and then survives that population forward 5 years at a time. The elements of the projection process incorporate the decremental effects of mortality and emigration and introduce the redistributive impacts of internal migration. The 5-year contribution of immigration is expressed as a distribution with age and region-specific numbers, but the projection model accounts for emigration by combining emigration rates with death rates to make use of the standard methods for decrementing the population in a multiregional life table. In addition, we adapted the open multiregional projection model to simultaneously project the foreign-born and native-born populations separately, so that the demographic processes can be differentiated, while still allowing the foreign-born population to contribute births to the native-born population total. That is, the foreign-born population generates births, but these births are treated as increments to the first age group of the native-born population in each region.

The population projection represents the age- and period-specific fertility, mortality, emigration, and internal migration processes of the foreign-born population and the immigration distribution represents the foreign-born persons entering the country during the period. But the projected population distribution is not the true foreign-born population because it includes the foreign-born contribution to native-born births. One therefore needs to extract the foreign-born births from the appropriate region-specific element of the projected population distribution that represents the first age group in each region and then to increment the appropriate elements of the native-born population to include the contributions of these births contributed by the foreign-born population. Of course, this problem does not appear if the evolution of only the elderly population is of interest. The birth component then becomes the aging-in component, that is, total births are replaced in the accounting equation by the number of persons aging-in to enter the first elderly age group (i.e., those becoming 60–64 years of age during the 5-year time interval). For example, consider the growth of a region's elderly population from t to t + 1. This growth can be expressed in the following manner:

(1)

where P represents the total elderly regional population, A represents the number of total persons aging-in to the elderly population, D represents the number of total persons dying out of the elderly population, IN is in-migration from the other regions in the system, O is the out-migration from the region in question to the other regions, I is the immigration component, and E is the number of emigrants. The last four terms identify the contribution of net migration, and the difference between A and D defines the contribution of net aging-in-place.

1 describes total regional population growth as a summation of the initial population and the increments and decrements contributed by the principal demographic sources of growth. Each nativity-specific population is treated separately. However, one difference in the two accounting equations needs to be noted. To describe the growth of the elderly native-born population in each region, we set the I and E components to zero by assumption, because of the relatively insignificant contributions made by the two components to the growth of that population. Thus, we have

(2)

2 may be contrasted with the corresponding accounting equation for the foreign-born population, which retains the immigration and emigration components:

(3)

The numbers that correspond to each source of growth, except for E and I, may be obtained in the process of projecting the population distribution forward and then identifying and summing over the appropriate elements.

	Results

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Have Interregional Elderly Migration Patterns Changed?
Golant 1990 had three principal findings. First, although the levels had declined for shorter distance residential mobility, they increased, at the national level, for interregional and interstate migration, except for the last period studied (1980–85; see last column of Table 2 ). Second, before the 1980–85 period, the percentages of elderly persons migrating to the South from the other three regions had been steadily increasing, but only the West's elderly residents were more likely to migrate to the South in the 1980–85 period than before (see Table 2 ). Third, after identifying the net migration contributions made by these changing migration patterns (see Table 3 ) regarding the elderly population totals, Golant noted another discontinuity in the 1980–85 patterns. After a quarter century of steadily increasing net losses of elderly migrants, the Northeast and Midwest exhibited smaller net losses during the 1980–85 period, the South experienced smaller net gains, and the West for the first time showed net migration losses.

View larger version (17K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 6. Percentage of elderly (aged 60 years and older) residents moving to a different region: 1955–60 to 1985–90. Note that 1980–1985 (CPS) data are from Golant 1990, Table 3 .

View larger version (20K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 7. Percentage of elderly (aged 60 years and older) residents moving to a different region by nativity: 1955–60 to 1985–90.

The data in Table 3 demonstrate that the Northeast in 1985–90 did not experience smaller net migration losses. The Midwest did, but to a much smaller degree than indicated in the 1980–85 data. The South did not experience smaller net migration gains in the 1985–90 period. Indeed its gains reached a record high. Finally, the West in 1985–90 did not experience net migration losses but registered a gain of roughly the same level that it experienced in 1965–70.

In assessing our findings, the reader is reminded that our analyses focus on the group aged 60 years and older at the beginning of each time interval, whereas Golant 1990 deal with the group aged 65 years and older. However, in comparing his numbers with ours (tables available on request from the authors), we found such minor variations that we conclude that the differences in delimitating the elderly age group was not the underlying cause for the differences in our respective findings. (Indeed, our comparisons of the numbers make us wonder whether in fact his 65 years and older delineation refers to age at the end of the interval.) In any case, we believe that the differences were caused by the very small sample size of the 1980–85 data set, a potential problem that Golant himself pointed out in his article.

What Drives Regional Elderly Population Growth: Migration or Aging-in-Place?
Policy analysts all too often adopt a somewhat narrow view of expected regional changes in elderly populations by focusing only on the contribution of elderly migration to demographic change and ignoring the usually larger contribution of aging-in-place. Because much of elderly migration is selective of individuals and is undertaken near the age of retirement, the relatively young elderly migrants are, on average, more likely to be married, better educated, wealthier, and healthier than the nonmigrant elderly population that they join (Biggar 1980; Rogers 1992). Consequently, regional elderly populations that grow mostly from net aging-in-place (for example, that in New York) are more likely to need more health services and exert a larger per capita demand on government funds than regions that grow mostly from net migration, such as Florida (Rogers and Woodward 1988).

Regions in which the elderly population grows mostly by net aging-in-place are losing their relatively younger, well-off members and gaining older, more dependent elderly persons in exchange. A shrinking tax base and an aged population with many dependent on local service institutions is the likely result. Regions in which the elderly population grows mostly by net migration, however, may benefit from the expenditures of pension and retirement funds that increase local demands for retail goods and services, without adding significant demands to the collective public welfare burden or to the pressure for social services for aged persons. The Older Americans Act allocates federal funds for state-run programs on the basis of the number of people aged 60 and older, without reference to the differences in the average socioeconomic characteristics of elderly residents in the states. Thus principal origin states, such as New York, may be shortchanged in favor of important destination states, such as Florida. Therefore, both sources of growth of the elderly population should be examined jointly in studies of the policy impacts of the changing interstate geography of elderly persons. The sources-of-growth method outlined in Rogers and Woodward 1988 has been applied by Rogerson 1996 to study the state-level population growth of the elderly population in the United States. He found that the spatial pattern of the rate of entry into the elderly cohort among nonmovers is a particularly strong influence in determining changes in the proportion of a state's population that is elderly.

Finally, a country's elderly population is not spread uniformly across the national territory. Geographical concentrations of elderly persons arise at destinations with high amenities as elderly migrants move across longer distances in search of amenity-rich communities with sunnier and warmer climates and recreationally diverse environments. But such concentrations also arise as a consequence of net aging-in-place—the "natural increase" component of elderly population change that is the numerical difference between pre-elderly persons who remain in (or move into) the region and enter the first elderly age group there (i.e., elderly "births") and elderly persons who die during the unit time interval.

Earlier in this article we set out a multiregional projection model that is open to international migration streams and that is responsive to historical changes in each demographic process. Using the outputs of that model, we contrasted the foreign-born and native-born contributions to population growth. To do this we added together their respective components of growth and obtained the total for each region. In addition, to simplify the presentation of our analysis, we added together the growth components for each pair of adjacent 5-year periods to describe the historical growth by decade. For a particular region, such as the Northeast, say, over a given decade, for example from t to t + 1, total elderly population growth, G_NE(t,t + 1), can be partitioned as follows:

In Equation 5 the foreign-born contribution is disaggregated into the net aging-in-place, net internal migration, and net immigration components. Each of the net components is calculated as the difference between the respective incremental and decremental contributions. The native-born disaggregation is dealt with in a similar way, but the net immigration component is set to zero by assumption. Finally, we divided each component, presented as numbers of persons in the above equations, by the base population to derive the appropriate relative contribution to the total regional decadal rate being analyzed. The results of such a decompositional analysis are illustrated in Fig. 8.

View larger version (33K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 8. Components of decadal elderly (aged 60 years and older) growth rates, by region and nativity: 1950–60 to 1980–90.

For example, the factors that contributed to population decline in the Northeast (after 1960) were negative net aging-in-place and negative net internal migration. After 1970, positive net immigration acted to offset the loss due to net internal migration, but the elderly foreign-born population still declined because of negative net aging-in-place. The Midwest's elderly foreign-born population declined during the entire 40-year period under study, because net aging-in-place and net internal migration were both negative during this time interval. Although net immigration rates in the Midwest were positive after 1970, they were low relative to the other two components of change. Interestingly, the South's most important contributor to population growth was net internal migration (followed by net immigration after 1970). Finally, the elderly foreign-born population in the West grew substantially after 1970 because of high net immigration rates. Net internal migration also contributed to that region's growth, but not as significantly as it did in the South. In fact, during the 1980s, net internal migration in the West played a relatively minor role, when compared to the growth impacts of net aging-in-place and net immigration.

The corresponding patterns for the elderly native-born population showed two principal regional differences: (a) a clear separation of net aging-in-place levels, with the Northeast and West significantly exceeding those of the Midwest and South, and (b) an equally clear difference in net internal migration levels, which were positive for the South and West and negative for the Northwest and Midwest. (Because the relatively insignificant immigration and emigration numbers of the elderly native-born population were ignored in this analysis, no temporal paths for these two variables are presented.) Finally, the net aging-in-place component, and not net migration, was overwhelmingly the most important contributor to the regional growth rate.

Has Immigration Altered Elderly Dependency Ratios?
A recently issued draft report by the United Nations Population Division (United Nations 2000) on replacement migration has captured a surprising amount of attention from international audiences. The report set out alternative scenarios to identify the levels of immigration that would be necessary between 2000 and 2050 to offset projected declines in population totals, numbers of working-age persons, and ratios of workers to the population aged 65 and older. (Because the age composition of immigrant streams is generally younger than that of the host population, it is widely believed that a large influx of immigrants makes the host country's population significantly younger.) The report's controversial central conclusion was that the required immigration levels for virtually all countries of Europe as well as Japan may require huge influxes of immigrants.

The United Nations study focused on eight low-fertility countries, including the United States. For the United States, the study reported a year 2000 potential support ratio (i.e., the ratio of "potential workers" to pensioners calculated as the number of persons aged 15–64 years divided by the corresponding number of persons aged 65 and older) of 5.28 and projected it to stand at 2.82 50 years later. According to the report, to maintain a constant ratio of 5.2 from 2000 until 2050, it would be necessary to admit an average of 10.8 million immigrants every year until 2050, which would give rise to a U.S. population exceeding 1 billion persons.

Our own multiregional projection model may be adopted to generate a similar scenario over the 40-year historical period from 1950 to 1990 to identify the contribution that immigration made during those years to make the nation's population younger and its worker-to-elderly ratio smaller. Adopting the slightly older 65+ threshold to make our numbers comparable with those of the United Nations study, we found the results set out in Table 4 .

But we can also use our multiregional "sources of growth" projection model to generate counterfactual scenarios that allow us to calculate the contribution made by immigration to the growth of the U.S. total national population, along the lines followed by Passel and Edmonston 1992. We next adopted their procedure to carry out the same calculations for elderly regional populations over the period 1950–90.

Our projections from 1950 to 1990 served as the basis for developing the counterfactual immigration scenarios, with which we could approximate the contributions to the total U.S. population made by the following immigration cohorts: pre-1950, 1950–65, 1965–80, and 1980–90. To accomplish this task, we simply set the immigration component to zero in the population projections reflecting three separate scenarios: no immigration after 1950, no immigration after 1965, and no immigration after 1980. In these three scenarios, our principal interest revolved around the consequences, for the surviving stock of foreign-born persons, of eliminating immigration from the projections. Note that the populations are "linked" together, so that, for example, the elderly foreign-born population in the South could still grow (via internal migration), even if immigration to that region were halted.

In 1950, approximately 4.1 million out of 18.3 million elderly persons residing in the United States were foreign born. Because of mortality, this cohort totaled only about 1.4 million persons by 1990, and in recent decades it has been augmented by immigrants who entered the country after the immigration reforms of 1965. Thus, by 1990, 37.4% of the elderly foreign-born population consisted of immigrants who came after 1965. These "recent" immigrants have settled disproportionately in the West, accounting for 6.8% of elderly residents in that region, compared to a corresponding 1.1% in the Midwest.

The contributions of immigration to the regional elderly foreign-born population totals are illustrated in Fig. 9 revealing the changes that occurred after 1965. Not surprisingly, we found that the 1965–80 and 1980–90 immigration cohorts substantially changed the elderly foreign-born numbers in the South and West regions, accounting for 43% and 48% of those numbers, respectively. The corresponding percentages in the Northeast and Midwest were more modest in comparison (31% and 22%, respectively).

View larger version (46K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 9. Contribution of immigration to the regional elderly (aged 60 years and older) foreign-born populations: 1950–90.

Contrast this with the corresponding situation in 1970. In all four regions roughly 9 out of 10 elderly residents were foreign-born persons who entered the country before 1950. Twenty years later their representation in the elderly foreign-born population shrank to anywhere between 3 out of 10 (in the West) to 5 out of 10 (in the Midwest).

It is clear that immigration has been the principal contributor to the growth of the elderly foreign-born populations in all four regions. But how has it affected the shifting elderly age structures of those populations? To examine this question, we needed to separate immigration from the other demographic sources of growth and to look specifically at the age compositions of regional immigrants. For example, take the subset of the foreign-born population who arrived after 1965, the recent immigrant cohorts, and project them forward from 1965 to 1990, say, distinguishing them from the other "established" immigrant cohorts who arrived before 1965. Fig. 10 shows how these recent immigrant cohorts have contributed to the age distribution of the foreign-born population in 1990, in all four regions. It reveals, once again, that relatively few of the older foreign-born persons are recent immigrants. This is certainly more the case in the Northeast and the Midwest than in the South and West, where recent arrivals make up a higher proportion of the oldest age groups, indicating that the more recent elderly foreign-born immigrants are more likely to settle in the West and the South. In general, the recent immigrants are particularly more likely to live in the West, where their numbers are larger than in the other regions. The Northeast and the South have similar age distributions for the recent immigrant cohorts, but in the Northeast the established immigrant cohorts are more dominant at the older ages. Somewhat surprising is the relatively low representation of recent cohorts in the Midwest.

View larger version (22K): [in this window] [in a new window]   Figure 10. Elderly (aged 60 years and older) foreign-born population by age and region in 1990: recent immigrants (post-1965) versus established immigrants (pre-1965). Percentages on top of the bars represent recent immigrants.

	Discussion

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In this article we have addressed these three aspects of elderly population demographics and have come to several interesting conclusions. First, on the subject of changing internal elderly migration patterns, we found little evidence that the 1980s heralded a break with past trends and introduced a new migration spatial structure. Our analysis of the 1985–90 data found no evidence of such a break and, if one did occur earlier, then a return to past trends came surprisingly quickly. Indeed, if a break were to be identified, it more likely would be the 1975–80 period and not later.

If migration trends did not change significantly, what drove the demographics of elderly growth and redistribution? Using available data, indirect estimation techniques, and a multiregional projection model, we reconstructed elderly population changes for each 5-year period between 1950 and 1990 for the four U.S. census regions. In carrying out this reconstruction we partitioned historical elderly regional growth rates in several ways. First, we decomposed these rates to separately identify the contributions of the foreign-born and native-born populations. Second, we decomposed total regional growth rates for each of the four decades into increments and decrements that were attributable to the foreign-born and to the native-born populations. This allowed us to assess the importance of the three sources of elderly population growth and redistribution: net internal migration, net aging-in-place, and net international migration. Our analysis of data for the 40-year period between 1950 and 1990 reveals that the driving force behind the changes was net aging-in-place.

Finally, recent interest among policymakers about the possible population-rejuvenating effects of immigration has led the United Nations 2000 to issue a draft report on the topic. We considered this question and found only a little evidence of its impact, given past, recent, and current levels of inflows. Our analysis of the 1950–90 experience indicates that although immigration's impact has indeed contributed to higher worker-to-elderly ratios (or, equivalently, to lower elderly-to-worker dependency ratios), the amount of immigration over the past decades has been insufficient to counteract the much stronger countervailing impact of population aging.

	Acknowledgments

 
This research was supported by a grant from the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development (R01HD34092). We acknowledge the important help of Jani Little in the development of the overall project, of which this research is a part. An earlier version of this article was presented at the annual meeting of the Population Association of America in Los Angeles, March 23–25, 2000. The authors are grateful to the three anonymous reviewers, whose comments led to major improvements in the revised manuscript.

Received for publication April 26, 2000. Accepted for publication August 29, 2000.

	References

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