Census: Minority babies are now majority in United States--Washington Post & NYTimes reports
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/census-minority-babies-are-now-majority-in-united-states/2012/05/16/gIQA1WY8UU_story.html?hpid=z1
Census: Minority babies are now majority in United States
By Carol Morello and Ted Mellnik, Published: May 16
For the first time in U.S. history, most of the nation’s babies are members of minority groups, according to new census figures that signal the dawn of an era in which whites no longer will be in the majority.
Population estimates show that 50.4 percent of children younger than 1 last year were Hispanic, black, Asian American or in other minority groups. That’s almost a full percentage point higher than the 49.5 percent of minority babies counted when the decennial census was taken in April 2010. Census Bureau demographers said the tipping point came three months later, in July.
The latest estimates, which gauge changes since the last census, are a reflection of an immigration wave that began four decades ago. The transformation of the country’s racial and ethnic makeup has gathered steam as the white population grows collectively older, especially compared with Hispanics.
The census has forecast that non-Hispanic whites will be outnumbered in the United States by 2042, and social scientists consider that current status among infants a harbinger of the change.
“This is a watershed moment,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in family issues. “It shows us how multicultural we’ve become.”
Although minorities make up about 37 percent of the U.S. population, the District and four states are majority minority — California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas.
Metropolitan Washington, where whites are in the minority, is far ahead of the curve. Among children younger than 5, there are more minorities than whites in virtually every jurisdiction except Arlington and Loudoun counties. Statewide, Virginia has just barely more white children under age 1 than minorities, but they are on the verge of falling below half.
One of the biggest factors in the demographic change is age. Whites are by far the oldest group. Their median age is over 42, so many are beyond their prime childbearing years. In contrast, the median age for Hispanics is under 28. Blacks and Asians have median ages in their early 30s.
As the number of white women in their 20s and 30s declined over the past decade, the number of white children dropped in most states, said Kenneth Johnson, a sociologist with the University of New Hampshire.
“The population is literally changing before us, with the youngest replacing the oldest,” he said. “This is the first tipping point. The kids are in the vanguard of the change that’s coming.”
Places that serve Hispanic mothers and children are experiencing a baby boom. Mary’s Center, which started in Adams Morgan in 1988 to provide immigrant women with prenatal care, opened its fifth center Wednesday in Adelphi.
“The people who migrate are the young and healthy people,” said Maria Gomez, founder of the center. “They are fertile, and that’s the cycle of life.”
Dozens of women who are pregnant or pushing strollers streamed into Mary’s Center on Georgia Avenue on Wednesday to see doctors or social workers. Fourteen toddlers listened to stories narrated in English and Spanish while their parents attended English lessons.
“There are a lot of kids now, and many of them are Latinos,” said Mayra Jacinto, a native of Guatemala who arrived two hours before her doctor’s appointment, holding her 5-month-old daughter, Ivonne.
In the short term, it’s not clear whether the baby boom will continue. Immigration from Mexico, the country of origin for the vast majority of Hispanic immigrants in the United States, has come to a standstill and may be moving in reverse.
William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution, said the slowdown in immigration may delay the nation’s transformation to a majority-minority society from 2042 to 2050 or beyond. But he said it will not prevent it.
“Eventually, when the economy returns, we’re going to get more immigrants, maybe not from Mexico but from other parts of the world,” he said. Without so many youthful immigrants, he added, the United States would look more like Japan, with its disproportionate share of elderly citizens.
“We were already seeing a declining youth population in large parts of the country,” Frey said. “Without immigrants, we’d be essentially youthless. We had a perfect storm. We got them all coming, younger immigrants having children, at a time when we really needed them.”
The future is here, in Northern Virginia, where several hundred thousand immigrants have settled over the past 25 years from societies as different as Vietnam, El Salvador, Ethiopia and Iraq.
The backgrounds of children enrolled in Head Start programs in the area have changed with each wave of immigrants. From 2010 to 2011, Hispanics held steady, but the number of children of Asian and African origin jumped more than 30 percent, while those with roots elsewhere, such as from the Middle East, doubled.
“The face of Head Start here has changed, but not the earnest desire of these families to see their children do the best they can,” said Melinda Langford, the Arlington Head Start director for Northern Virginia Family Service, a private nonprofit agency that serves 2,400 children younger than 11.
At Langford’s program, six in 10 preschoolers have parents who were born in another country. Colorful drawings line the halls and classroom walls, signed with names such as Francisco, Dayana, Khadija, Ureal, Lavand, Betel, Estefany, Brittany and Seid.
Program officials describe their mission as an affirmation of diversity as well as an educational boost for struggling kids. Sometimes they face cultural challenges, such as parents accustomed to disciplining their children more harshly than U.S. laws allow. To help with communication, Head Start employs class assistants and family advocates who are native speakers of a wide range of languages.
Cherlin said the immigrant baby boom will eventually taper off. Studies suggest that the children and grandchildren of the newest immigrants will have birthrates much closer to those of non-Hispanic whites.
“The changes to the country may not be as huge as some people think,” he said. “Immigrants will change our society, but our society will change the immigrants.”
The new census estimates also offered a glimpse of a region that reflects national trends and in some cases defies them.
The District continued its rebound, attracting 16,000 new residents from all age groups — in one year gaining almost as many people as the 20,000 it added the entire previous decade. Although the number of African Americans rose by more than 2,000, their proportion dipped below 50 percent for the first time in decades. Whites had the biggest increase, at 8,000. But among babies, the number of Hispanic infants rose the most as a percentage, up 70 percent, to 1,700. The number of infants who are white also rose sharply, while there were fewer African American babies.
In both Maryland and Virginia, the numbers of Hispanics and Asians continued to grow sharply. The number of blacks increased modestly, while the number of whites was virtually unchanged.
In Prince George’s County, one of the most affluent majority-black counties in the nation, the number of African Americans declined slightly, while Hispanics and whites gained.
Staff writers Pamela Constable and Luz Lazo contributed to this report.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/us/whites-account-for-under-half-of-births-in-us.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20120517&pagewanted=all
Whites Account for Under Half of Births in U.S.
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
Published: May 17, 2012 582 Comments
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WASHINGTON — After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.
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Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the 12-month period that ended last July, according to Census Bureau data made public on Thursday, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4 percent, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history.
Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.
While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a “transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multiethnic country that we are becoming.”
Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler population, Mr. Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.
A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country’s elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.
The contrast raises important policy questions. The United States has a spotty record educating minority youth; will older Americans balk at paying to educate a younger generation that looks less like themselves? And while the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?
“The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don’t look like one another?” said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.
The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that ended last July, about 26 percent were Hispanic, about 15 percent black, and about 4 percent Asian.)
Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 percent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 percent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years.
Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants, he said.
The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 percent of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, Mr. Frey calculated, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s, when the TV characters Ozzie and Harriet were a national archetype.
The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The nonrural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Ariz., where just 18 percent of people under 20 are white, compared with 73 percent of people over 65, Mr. Frey said.
Perhaps the most urgent aspect of the change is education. A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Mr. Frey, just 13 percent of Hispanics and 18 percent of blacks have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites.
Those stark statistics are made more troubling by the fact that young Americans will soon be faced with caring for the bulging population of baby boomers as they age into retirement, said William O’Hare, a senior consultant to the Annie E. Casey Foundation in Baltimore, on top of inheriting trillions of dollars of government debt.
“The forces coming together here are very clear, but I don’t see our political leaders putting them together in any coherent way,” he said, adding that educating young minorities was of critical importance to the future of the country and the economy.
Immigrants took several generations to assimilate through education in the last large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century, Mr. Suarez-Orozco said, but mobility was less dependent on education then, and Americans today cannot afford to wait, as they struggle to compete with countries like China.
“This is a polite knock on the door to tell us to get ready,” said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “We do a pretty lousy job of educating the younger generation of minorities. Basically, we are not ready for this.”
But there are bright spots. Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, said the immigration debate of recent years has raised the political consciousness of young Latinos and he is hopeful that more will become politically active as a result. Only half of eligible Latino voters cast ballots in 2008, he said, compared with 65 percent of eligible non-Hispanic voters. “We have an opportunity here with this current generation,” Mr. Vargas said. About 50,000 Latinos turn 18 every month, he said.
And the fact that the country is getting a burst of births from nonwhites is a huge advantage, argues Dowell Myers, professor of policy, planning and demography at the University of Southern California. European societies with low levels of immigration now have young populations that are too small to support larger aging ones, exacerbating problems with the economy.
“If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead,” Mr. Myers said. “Without the contributions from all these other groups, we would become too top-heavy with old people.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 17, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Whites Account For Under Half Of Births In U.S..
