The recession is profoundly disrupting American life: More people are delaying marriage and home-buying, turning to carpools yet stuck in ever-worse traffic, staying put rather than moving to a new city.
A broad array of US census data, released on Monday, also shows a dip in the foreign-born population last year, to under 38 million after it reached an all-time high in 2007. This was due to declines in low-skilled workers from Mexico searching for jobs in Arizona, Florida and California.
Health coverage varied widely by region, based partly on levels of unemployment. Massachusetts, with its universal coverage law, had fewer than one in 20 uninsured residents — the lowest in the nation.
Texas had the highest share, at one in four, largely because of illegal Hispanic immigrants excluded from government-sponsored and employer-provided plans.
Demographers said the latest figures were striking confirmation of the social impact of the economic decline as it hit home last year.
Findings come from the annual American Community Survey, a sweeping look at life built on information from 3 million households.
Preliminary data earlier this year found that many Americans were not moving, staying put in big cities rather than migrating to Sunbelt states because of frozen lines of credit. Mobility is at a 60-year low, upending population trends ahead of next year’s census that will be used to apportion House seats.
“The recession has affected everybody in one way or another as families use lots of different strategies to cope with a new economic reality,” said Mark Mather, associate vice president of the nonprofit Population Reference Bureau. “Job loss — or the potential for job loss — also leads to feelings of economic insecurity and can create social tension.”
“It’s just the tip of the iceberg,” he said, adding that unemployment was still rising.
Marital bliss also suffered. Nearly one in three Americans aged 15 or over, or 31.2 percent, reported they had never been married, the highest level in a decade. The share had previously hovered for years around 27 percent, before beginning to climb during the housing downturn in 2006.
The never-married included three-quarters of men in their 20s and two-thirds of women in that age range. Sociologists say younger people are taking longer to reach economic independence and consider marriage, because they are struggling to find work or focusing on an advanced education.
About one in five US residents spoke a language other than English at home, mostly clustered in California, New Mexico and Texas.
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