Brian McGarry

Yeah, so what we find is that roughly a 25% increase in the flow of immigrants into the U.S.

we estimate would prevent about 5,000 deaths among our nation's older adults.

So these are 65 and older at the start of our study.

The motivation for this study really comes from the fact that our health care system disproportionately relies on immigrant workers.

So we find in the paper that for roughly about 1,000 new immigrants coming into the U.S.,

leads to about 173 more healthcare workers, both foreign and domestic.

So often a concern with immigration is that the immigrants are sort of displacing domestic workers.

In our case, we find actually some slight sort of what we call crowd in, where, you know, with greater capacity of immigrant workers,

Many of them who may be sort of support staff in the health care system, nurses, aides, may actually create jobs that allow hiring of other domestic workers.

Absolutely.

And that's a really important point.

In this paper, a lot of the effect seems to come through keeping older adults out of nursing homes and for those who are in the nursing homes themselves.

potentially improving the quality of the care delivered.

And so a lot of the care that's delivered is done by what we refer to as low skilled, not to imply that they don't have really great skills, but they don't require the same levels of education.

And so that turns out to be a really important part of the health effects.

Yes, that's right.

So what we're doing here is prolonging life for older adults.

Nursing homes are inherently congregate living settings.

Those are sort of ripe for infectious disease outbreaks.

But we also know that, you know, for the most part, older adults prefer to age in place than to age at home.