Long Island boasts sandy white beaches, close proximity to New York City, many fine restaurants and, in Nassau County especially, some of the best schools in the country.

And yet from 2017 to 2022, Long Island lost more than 110,000 residents with the greatest loss coming in 2022 as 58,361 departed, data from the U.S. Census that was analyzed by the Long Island Association’s Research Institute shows.

Worse, the decrease was fueled by younger residents fleeing to other states. The average age of those leaving Long Island and going out of state was 29.

This trend, which began a decade ago, should raise red flags for residents of Nassau and Suffolk counties.

“Demographics is destiny and as a region if we’re not growing, we’re dying,” said Matt Cohen, president of the Melville-based Long Island Association, the most prominent voice of the region’s business community. “And to remain economically competitive with other parts of New York State, and other parts of the country, we need to stop this trend in its tracks.”

So what’s the matter with Long Island?

“This is a tough place to operate a business and is a high-cost region for families, young professionals as well as employers,” Cohen told Newsday.

The Long Island Association recently listed expanding options for affordable housing and affordable child care along with opposing costly new mandates on businesses among its top policy priorities for 2024.

This is consistent with the message that Gov. Kathy Hochul has been sending out, saying New York faces a shortfall of 800,000 housing units.

The impact of a lack of housing – affordable or otherwise –  is basic economics. Lower supply than demand means higher costs – something that younger people are more likely to feel first.

Also working against younger people on Long Island is the lack of less expensive rental options in a county where about 85% of all housing is single-family.

Hochul has made two proposals to increase new housing but pulled back after heated opposition from local officials who said they are better positioned than Hochul to fix the problem. We’ll believe it when we see it.

Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican, pointed to taxes as the No. 1 reason for Nassau County losing population.

“It is not surprising that people are leaving New York State where taxes are some of the highest in the nation,” Blakeman said. The county executive did not offer specific solutions to New York’s high taxes.

In New York, the tax burden is divided mostly between sales, property taxes and state income taxes as well as federal taxes.

Blakeman ran for county executive, promising to cut county taxes but has yet to do so.

He has also failed to fix the county’s dysfunctional reassessment system, which has shifted billions in taxes from older, more affluent residents who challenge their property taxes to younger, less affluent owners who do not challenge them.

The share of property taxes that go to the county as well as special districts is actually a relatively small part – one-third – of what is paid by Nassau County property owners.

The rest, nearly two-thirds, goes to school districts. That is an area of spending that few are publicly opposing.

New York schools, which receive $35.3 billion in state aid, have the highest per-pupil spending of all 50 states, laying out $24,040 per pupil, approximately 90% above the national average.

On the North Shore per pupil spending is as high as $47,000 with many districts spending near or at $40,000.

By contrast, Florida, the No. 1 destination for New Yorkers leaving Long Island, spends $9,983 per pupil.

Ironically, some Long Island school districts have blamed their high spending per pupil on the high cost of living on Long Island – especially the high cost of housing.

Long Island school districts and elected officials have also responded angrily to changes in foundation aid – money intended to ensure a basic education to New York students – that reduces their share.

Among their objections is Hochul’s proposed elimination of the “hold harmless” provision that has guaranteed a school district receiving at least as much foundation aid from year to year no matter the district’s need. Or population.

There is another solution to the decline in Long Island’s overall population and in schools that can probably be done much more quickly – immigration.

This also faces strong opposition.

Blakeman and other Republicans have repeatedly said the surge of migrants at the southern border under President Biden has resulted in rising crime in New York.

A flood of ads for Republican Nassau County Legislator Mazi Pilip in her failed congressional campaign against Democrat Tom Suozzi said the immigration crisis on the southern border resulted in blood in the streets.

Suozzi won the race by 8 percentage points after he supported and Pilip opposed a very conservative immigration reform plan to fix a broken immigration system following former President Trump’s call for House and Senate Republicans to turn it down.

This has allowed the Republican attacks on “migrant crime” to continue, led by Trump.

But a review of available 2024 crime data by NBC News shows overall crime levels dropping in cities that have received the most migrants.

This is consistent with previous studies that have found that immigrants commit fewer crimes, attend church more regularly, start more businesses than native-born Americans and take low-paying jobs that are hard to fill.

Recent studies have also shown that immigration has propelled the U.S. job market in recent years, aiding the country’s economic rebound from the COVID pandemic as the most robust in the world.

An Economic Policy Institute analysis of federal data shows that about 50 percent of the labor market’s extraordinary recent growth came from foreign-born workers between January 2023 and January 2024.

Even before that, by the middle of 2022, the foreign-born labor force had grown so fast that it closed the labor force gap created by the pandemic, according to research from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the surge in immigration is expected to increase the nation’s Gross Domestic Product by $7 trillion over the next decade.

”These immigrants are more likely to work than their native-born counterparts, largely because immigrants skew younger,” Washington Post columnist Catherine Rampell recently wrote. “This infusion of working-age immigrants will more than offset the expected retirement of the aging, native-born population.”

On Long Island, “asylum-seekers have pumped millions into Long Island’s economy since arriving to the region by the thousands,“ according to a report by the Immigration Research Initiative and the Ellis Island Initiative.

Blakeman, a Republican who has fiercely opposed efforts to relocate city migrants to Nassau County, said the group’s report tells only part of the story.

“The statistics don’t take into account that over $27 million in state and federal taxes are used to subsidize these migrants,” Blakeman said. “So for the average taxpayer it is a $24 million deficit, not a $3 million asset.”

In the short term, Blakeman may have a point.

The current asylum system does not allow migrants to legally work for six months. That was one of the fixes in the immigration reform package that Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana won’t allow to come to the floor.

But more than 230 years of history provide the answer long term. We need more immigrants, not fewer, under an immigration system that protects our borders.

Add to that more places for immigrants and Long Island’s younger people to live.