Post by Faith Christenson. Colgate Class of 2022.

“The migrants who made China an industrial giant face a grim retirement”, The Economist, November 30th, 2019. 

This article expresses the issues in China’s retirement benefits system and how migrants contribute and are affected.  The article starts by explaining the background of China’s industrial history. Many places were not the industrial stops they are today. Places like Guangzhou used to be “a bit of an embarrassment,” full of factories and dismal workshops. Now it is a hotspot for commerce internationally. This rebuild in the city’s power and reputation came through the work of migrants from rural areas of China and other countries. Migrant workers helped to build China to its current state and yet many of them have fallen through its retirement system. According to the national survey on living conditions, around one hundred million who are covered by the Chinese unified urban pension system receive monthly benefits that are approximately equal to 369 U.S. dollars. That leaves almost one hundred and fifty million on the state pension system where the benefits are about 17 U.S. dollars a month. This difference is vast and many of the people receiving these low benefits are migrants. 

This article stuck out to me because it is very similar to a problem that we will likely have in the United States if there is not a change. Right now our social security is running very low. Due to the average life expectancy with modern medicine being longer and the high population of the baby boomer generation, social security has more people drawing on it than ever before. However, birth rates have slowed and while there are now more people to support through social security, there are fewer people to do the supporting. The ratio has dropped tremendously. If the ratio is not restored soon, we could end up in a similar situation to China. The United States’ income inequality does not make this situation better, as we are prone to having people live on opposite ends of the spectrum, like China, if this were to happen.

A way to potentially solve this problem is to raise immigration. Immigrants would help to bring up the ratio. The only issue is that not all immigrants can receive social security, so there would effectively be people paying in that would never get to take it out. That would be an advantage for our citizens but would leave immigrants with very little. In this case, a large disparity would be present.