Since 2000, ethnic minorities have become a majority of children under 15 in two of the US’ fastest-growing states, Florida and Nevada, with Georgia, Maryland and New York poised to follow, census data released on Wednesday showed.
Hawaii was the only state where the share of non-Hispanic white children rose.
The shift was even more pronounced among children under five, already nearly a majority nationally. Last year, New York became the 12th state where they constitute a majority, with New Jersey poised to be the 13th.
ILLUSTRATION: MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
Overall, Hispanics continued to grow faster than any other group, surpassing 15 percent of the nation’s population last year for the first time, the Census Bureau said.
From 2006 to last year, the US Census Bureau said, the Hispanic population grew by 3.3 percent, compared with 2.9 percent for Asians, 1.3 percent for blacks and 0.3 percent for non-Hispanic whites.
But since the decade began, the number of Asians increased even faster than Hispanics in 14 states, generally those with large Hispanic populations, including Connecticut, New Jersey and New York.
EVOLVING PROFILE
Ethnic minorities now account for more than one in three Americans.
The latest estimates dramatize the breadth of the nation’s growing diversity, even as nearly one-third of the people whom the census classifies as members of those minorities live in California and Texas. (Texas has overtaken California as the biggest gainer of Hispanic residents.)
Those estimates also concur with projections that minorities will constitute a majority of the nation’s population by 2050.
America’s evolving profile signifies potentially profound changes in the electorate, both in the ranks of ethnic minorities of voting age (since 2000, the white share dropped by 7 percentage points in Nevada and 5 points in California) and also in wide disparities in where people are growing older.
From July 1, 2006, to July 1 last year, the proportion of Americans 65 and older increased to 13 percent, from 12 percent.
At the other end of the age spectrum, as a result of migration and immigration to places with more plentiful employment and housing, the number of children up to 15 years old declined in 31 states since 2000 — led by New York, which lost 326,000. Their ranks shrank by more than 10 percent in Louisiana, North Dakota and Vermont.
“While all parts of America are aging, we are experiencing a selective ‘younging’ in this country, which will affect everything from schools and labor-force needs to political agendas in the near term,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Brookings Institution.
HISPANIC INFLUENCE
In Arizona and Nevada, the influx and birth of Hispanics has helped increase the total number of children by more than 20 percent since the decade began.
In the same period, the share of white non-Hispanic children in Nevada declined to 44 percent, from nearly 54 percent, the most of any state.
The growth of both Hispanics and Asian-Americans was fueled by immigration and higher fertility. While about 15 percent more births than deaths were recorded among whites since 2000, more than eight times as many Hispanics, four times as many Asians and twice as many blacks were born than died.
SOUTHERN MIGRATION
New York, which ranked fourth among the highest gainers of blacks in the 1990s, has now recorded three successive years of black population losses. Similar losses were registered in Michigan, another magnet for blacks during the Great Migration in the 20th century.
Since 2006, the greatest gains in blacks were made by nine Southern states, reflecting the continued migration there from other regions. Florida led the nation in black gains in the two previous decades, but Georgia is poised to be first in this decade.
Frey projected that California and New York were on track to lose fewer whites this decade than in the 1990s — the opposite of New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Florida, which led the nation in white gains over the last three decades, gained just 4,000 last year, compared with 67,000 in 2006 and 123,000 in 2005.
Since 2000, according to an analysis by Mark Mather, associate vice president of the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group, baby boomers closest to retirement age have been moving into several of the fast-growing states, including Arizona, Florida, Idaho and Nevada, and also to Arkansas, the Carolinas, Delaware, Georgia, Montana, Oregon, South Dakota and Utah.
The oldest of the nation’s nearly 80 million baby boomers turned 62 in January. A higher proportion of the elderly are white, compared with the population generally, in which non-Hispanic whites registered only negligible increases.
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