With name databases, there seems to have been a phenomenon where people retroactively created records when they were introduced (e.g., people registered for SSNs after the fact). Maybe there's something similar going on: people are overreporting their age when born with no records, but also are overreporting their age when they registered their birth after the fact.
It's a bit hard to explain in terms of underreporting age, and the trends are such that I think they still largely support the authors' hypotheses in terms of relative overreporting and underreporting. But I agree there's probably more fuzziness here.
The bigger issue for me that this raises are the perils of making inferences on outliers of any distribution. The further out you go on any characteristic, the more likely you are going to run into similar problems with errors, fraud, or unusual circumstances.
God bless your parents. I don’t care much for the immigration debate in our country, but we should be actively recruiting people like this.
Just to be clear, you're indicating that the criteria we should be selecting for is people willing to falsify information on official documents.
I also suspect that if you posed a force-choice question to most Americans, "Who would you rather have in this country: people who are willing to falsify official documents so they can work hard for longer, or people who stick to the letter of the law so that they can work as little as possible?", they would choose the former.
I'd prefer meaningful criteria that result in new citizens who would make positive contributions to a community, not criteria that would encourage otherwise ethical people to falsify official documents nor ones that equate toil with virtue.
They usually don't even use the same month and day for their fake DOB. This is because everyone in the family only celebrate their chinese/lunar calendar birthday instead (which is already on a different western date each year).
Context: Men 18-45 were excluded from the ILO Convention on forced labour of 1930 which included all other humans. They had to wait until 1957 to be included in the UN one. It’s often cited when people talk about women getting the vote only in 1945.
This is a persistent story in professional football (soccer). Clubs have taken to measuring wrist bones and other techniques to avoid buying players who are older than they say. A problem for people from countries where the official documentation process is somehow lacking.
It has been suggested that he lied about his age when he moved up north in order to avoid being discriminated against when applying for jobs. Or he may have been born in 1902 and simply lying about, or genuinely mistaken about, his age.
I wouldn't say much has changed in some regions of the US