USC Demographer Tells Why Immigrants and Boomers Need Each Other

February 13, 2007

What: USC demographer Dowell Myers discusses his new book, Immigrants and Boomers: Forging a New Social Contract for the History of America (Russell Sage). The book tracks the interaction between California's two dominant demographic trends: the large influx of immigrants and the aging of the baby boomers.

Boomer retirement will leave critical shortages in the educated workforce, shrink the ranks of middle-class taxpayers and drive up entitlement expenditures. As retirees sell off their houses, the prospect of a generational collapse in housing prices looms.

Immigrant families' impressive progress suggests they have the potential to pick up the slack from aging boomers over the next two decades, but only if aging white voters support education and other social services for immigrants and their children now.

When: Wednesday, Feb. 14, 12-1:30 p.m. Lunch will be provided.

Where: Library and Courts Building, Room 500, 914 Capitol Mall, Sacramento

Who: Dowell Myers is the director of the Population Dynamics Research Group and a professor of urban planning in the USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development.

Myers is a specialist in urban growth and development with expertise as a planner and urban demographer.

An advisor to the U.S. Census Bureau, Myers authored the most widely referenced work on census analysis, Analysis with Local Census Data: Portraits of Change (Academic Press, 1992).

He is also an academic fellow of the Urban Land Institute and a member of the Governing Board of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning.

To RSVP: Call the California Research Bureau at (916) 653-7843.