Population aging has become a defining challenge of our time and is galloping ahead faster than predicted. In China, births have now fallen to levels not seen since 1949. But many countries are getting old before they grow rich: Comparable declines are being seen in Latin America, the Middle East, and North Africa. A shrinking workforce means less money to go around and increasing difficulties shouldering the costs of covering health care and pensions for retirees.

In many fast-aging, wealthier countries, immigration has long been a demographic salve. But immigration will not fix aging in the long run; holding worker-to-retiree ratios steady through migration alone would require a 75-percent increase in the combined population of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries by 2050. Most countries lack the social license for immigration at this scale—to say nothing of the pressure such an increase would put on housing systems and public infrastructure already under strain. The last several years have seen a rising backlash to immigration in many high-income countries that is partly (although not wholly) explained by pressures on housing and public services that stem from this type of population growth. For instance, Canada bringing in more than 1 million people in 2023 to compensate for low population growth during the COVID-19 pandemic was swiftly met by public backlash.

While immigration cannot solve population aging, it can be a useful demographic and economic lever—if it is employed more effectively. One needed change is a shift in perspective toward seeing migrants as families rather than single applicants. A trailing spouse who cannot access the labor market, or a child failed by an underfunded education system, represents foregone fiscal value that directly undermines the demographic dividend immigration is meant to deliver. Such examples point to the increased importance of measures that support the integration of newcomers and their families and that unlock underused human capital, including among previous cohorts of migrants.

Immigration policy and demographic strategy need to be brought further in line with each other. Five principles could guide that relationship:

Human capital matters more than a headcount. Each worker shoulders a higher fiscal burden in an aging society with a small workforce. As a result, the composition of arriving migrants—skills, earning potential, sector alignment, career stage—will increase in importance. This means prioritizing the admission of high earners or younger workers with longer careers ahead of them, and investing in credential recognition so that immigrants can work at their skill level. AI should also factor into this calculus: The skills worth importing today may not be the ones that matter in a decade, and thus selection systems should value adaptability to changing labor market conditions.

Integration is a productivity multiplier. The role of integration, rather than immigration, policies in meeting labor shortages is often overlooked. In the Netherlands, three-quarters of current vacancies could be filled if migrants participated in the labor market at the same rate as the native born. Language training, job counselling, subsidized work experience, and bridging programs can all allow newcomers early access to work while also enabling subsequent upskilling. As such, some countries’ decisions to cut integration budgets at precisely the moment labor shortages are biting is a false economy. Governments should treat integration programming as a productivity investment, not a welfare cost.

Population planning is economic planning. Immigration is often siloed off from housing, infrastructure, and pension policy, and rarely is part of long-term planning. For instance, Spain’s recent demographic recovery plan lists 130 measures to address aging and regional decline without a single reference to migrants or integration, even as the government is expanding migration for demographic reasons. But other countries, such as Korea, are starting to build immigration into population plans, alongside pro-natalist policies. More governments could learn from the migration levels planning processes that Australia and Canada have developed, however imperfectly, both to better integrate immigration with fiscal sustainability and pension projections and to properly resource housing and infrastructure expansions associated with population growth.

Immigrants age too. Destination countries are now grappling with a rising population of immigrant retirees, including some lacking legal status in the country, and many are reaching retirement age without a pension or health care. Among migrants who do return to their country of origin after working abroad, many lose access to pension entitlements due to fragmented contributions or lack of portable benefits. Temporary migration programs may appear to solve the problem for destination countries, but they effectively offshore the costs of aging onto lower-income origin countries. Instead, countries should explore ways to share the burden for retirement more equitably, including by giving migrants autonomy over their own retirement funds.

Immigration policy should reduce rather than entrench global inequality. Many low- and middle-income countries that send significant numbers of workers to high-income countries are rapidly aging too, which will intensify concerns about brain drain. This also points to a growing need for origin countries to capitalize on diaspora engagement and prioritize worker retention in sectors such as health care. Meanwhile, sub-Saharan Africa will generate the majority of global population growth in coming decades, but capturing that demographic advantage requires connecting development investment to mobility pathways—not through one-off pilots but sustained skills partnerships that link up training, mobility, and local economic development.

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