On the one side will be older baby boomers demanding all their federal retirement benefits. On the other will be an expanding population of younger and poorer Hispanics -- immigrants, their children and grandchildren -- increasingly resentful of their rising taxes that subsidize often-wealthier and unrelated baby boomers.My first reaction when I read that was, "Hey, I've seen something like that before. Oh yeah, I wrote it, but it was about France and its Muslim population".
Anyway, the problem for both the US & France boils down to assimilation. In what both Samuelson and I have written there is an assumption that the dominant immigrant group will not become full citizens and will not assimilate fully. If today's Hispanic immigrants produce a generation of American-born people who feel more Mexican (or Panamanian or Salvadoran or whatever) than American, then America has a big problem. This cannot be allowed to happen. All immigrants and their children must (a) choose to be American and (b) be allowed to be American. The same goes for France.
Right now, I think the United States is more likely to succeed in assimilating its immigrants than is France, but it's not an automatic 'yes' or 'no' in either case.
