Economy NewsTaco March 25, 2011

51% of Border Patrol Agents Set to Retire by 2012

This puts a whole new spin on the question “Who’s minding the store?”

While some legislators in Washington and in state capitols across the country are calling for stronger border enforcement (read here US-Mexico border, I doubt they mean the northern border), a report by the Government Accountability Office is pointing to a problem that no politician seems to be noticing.

51% of all the Border Patrol agents in the country are set to retire by 2012.

Before you go thinking that this is a Mayan sign of the apocalypse, consider this: Aren’t Congress and the GAO talking to each other about it? The report comes from a hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Overall it says that public employees are inching their way toward retirement and there is a need to begin to fill those positions.

Certain occupations have particularly high rates of workers eligible to retire. As shown in figure 4, 50 percent or more of the workers in 24 of the 315 occupations with 500 or more staff we reviewed are eligible to retire by 2012. Several of these occupations, such as air traffic controllers, customs and border protection interdiction agents, and administrative law judges are considered mission critical.
But if the overall growth of the US population is Latino, and you’d be right to think that Latinos will be taking up many of the jobs left vacant in government, then it follows that Latinos will be needed to guard the borders.
Here’s a government table that shows the problem across several “mission critical” areas:
Across the government 33 percent of the workers will retire by 2012. Who’s going to fill those posts?
Shouldn’t we be more concerned about educating and training a workforce instead of railing about border enforcement?

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