In the February 23 issue of The Economist, an article looks thoughtfully at the implications of today’s wave of Hispanic immigration. As the article notes, the demographic shift from this influx is no longer confined to a handful of cities and states, such as my own home state of California. It is transforming whole sections of the country, with profound impact on industry and the economy. The article, “The Newest Frontier,” is posted online at http://www.economist.com/world/na/displaystory.cfm?story_id=10727883.

How will the tide of Hispanic and other immigration shape the future? A new report from the Pew Research Center, issued February 11, suggests some answers, based on continuation of current trends. For example, the study predicts that the nation’s foreign-born population, now 36 million, will more than double in size to 81 million by 2050. Forty-two years from now, nearly one in five Americans will be a foreign-born immigrant, up from one in eight now.

We know that immigrants are at elevated risk for work-related injury, illness, and death for a variety of reasons, including disproportionately high employment in jobs that are more likely to pose risks, and language barriers that complicate safety and health training. The forecast in the Pew report reinforces the wisdom of taking steps now to address these risk factors and to craft solutions. Clearly, if unchecked, the problem will only become greater and more consuming in the coming decades, with serious implications for safety, family and community stability, and economic productivity into the next half-century.

NIOSH has worked closely with diverse partners to identify, understand, and meet the safety and health needs of the changing work force. In 1999, with commendable foresight, NIOSH and its stakeholders met in a national conference to define the challenges for safety and health training to serve the increasingly diverse workforce of the 21st Century, including non-English-speaking populations. The report from that conference is available as a NIOSH numbered document at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/docs/2004-132.

The needs outlined in that report have informed NIOSH’s subsequent research and outreach in relation to immigrant workers, notably the rapidly growing Hispanic immigrant population. To help fill a gap for meaningful, culturally appropriate training materials for Hispanic workers and their employers, NIOSH has worked with outside colleagues to develop bilingual educational documents for protecting worker safety and health in industries with a high proportion of men and women whose first language is Spanish. For example, Silicosis - El trabajo con tejas de cemento: el peligro de la sílice recommends controls and good work practices for reducing roofers’ exposures to silica dust, http://www.cdc.gov/spanish/niosh/docs/2006-110sp.html. Soluciones Simples: Ergonomía Para Trabajadores Agrícolas offers practical, cost-effective solutions for preventing painful and potentially disabling musculoskeletal injuries among farm workers, http://www.cdc.gov/spanish/niosh/docs/01-111pd-sp.html. Our Web page en espanõl serves as a portal for our stakeholders whose first language is Spanish, http://www.cdc.gov/spanish/niosh.

Another interesting prediction from the Pew study: the U.S. elderly population will more than double in size through 2050 – the result of the baby boomers entering what the report calls the traditional retirement years. If current employment trends continue, many of these men and women 65 or older will still be on the job, either part-time or full-time. Their safety and health needs will be different in many ways from those of younger workers, as an expert committee of the National Academies noted in a study conducted at NIOSH’s request, Health and Safety Needs of Older Workers, available at http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10884. Occupational safety and health issues for older workers are a focus of collaborative research under NIOSH’s program on work organization, http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/programs/workorg/emerging.html.

At the same time, other working men and women will follow the traditional retirement path – including occupational safety and health professionals, beginning over the next decade with those of my generation who entered their careers in the 1970s and early 1980s. It will be critically necessary to have in place a next generation of dedicated men and women to carry on the vital work that we do, and a next generation after that. Recruitment, professional development, continuing education, and mentoring will be more important than ever before. Support for high quality training and education through NIOSH’s Education and Research Centers and training grants programs has always been a mainstay of our field, and will become more so in the foreseeable future.

The Pew Research Center report, “Immigration to Play Lead Role in Future U.S. Growth: U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050,” by Jeffrey S. Passel and D’Vera Cohn, is available online at http://pewresearch.org/pubs/729/united-states-population-projections. While NIOSH does not have a “Project 2050” per se, our partnerships through the National Occupational Research Agenda (NORA) are all based on the reality that shaping the future for the better begins today. Further information on NORA can be found at http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/nora.