Minorities to make up half of U.S. by 2050

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
Los Angeles Times

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive Most e-mailed articles

The estimates through 2050 show that during the current decade, the United States will for the first time reach the demographic milestone of more than 100 million minority residents. By 2010, minorities will number more than 110 million out of a total population of 309 million.

"You really see a snapshot here of the old America and the new America at the same time," said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a centrist research and policy center in Washington. "One America will be white, middle-class and graying, and then you'll have this new kind of globalized America coming to the fore" — a "racial generation gap," he called it.

The broad direction of the demographic evolution had already been roughly mapped, but the new figures are based on the most recent data, factoring in the results of the 2000 census. The head count showed both a sharp increase in — and a geographic dispersal of — the Hispanic and Asian populations.

According to the new figures, the total U.S. population will rise to about 420 million in 2050, a 49 percent increase from 2000. As the baby-boom generation — those born between 1946 and 1964 — begins to die, the population will grow much more slowly. After 2030, the rate of increase might be the slowest since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The number of Hispanics is projected to grow to 103 million by 2050. That represents a nearly threefold increase from 36 million in 2000. The number of Asians is projected to rise to 33 million from 11 million in 2000.

The number of non-Hispanic whites, who now account for about 70 percent of the population, is projected to drop to barely more than 50 percent in 2050.

The share of blacks in the population is projected to increase slightly to 15 percent, compared with almost 13 percent now.

Whites are likely to cease being a majority around the mid-2050s.

The changes will bring potential benefits and pitfalls, according to experts who track such developments.

On the positive side, continued immigration will help keep the United States growing during years when Europe and Japan are expected to lose population. More working-age taxpayers may shore up the sagging bottom line of programs for the elderly, such as Medicare and Social Security.

"It's going to be immigrant labor supporting the aging white population," said Edward Telles, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Immigrants also provide links to foreign economies.

On the negative side, ethnic differences between the generations could make it more difficult to balance the rights of the elderly to a secure retirement with the obligations of younger workers.

"We are already seeing this in places in California, where the property-holding population that pays taxes for schools is different from the population that is sending kids to school," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based research group. "You have two basic interlocking dynamics: the aging of the non-Hispanic population and a very youthful Hispanic population."

Most U.S. Hispanics are of Mexican origin. For decades, Mexican Americans settled in the Southwest, California and Chicago. But in the 1990s, immigrants from Mexico began showing up by the thousands in much of the South and parts of the Northeast and Midwest, a trend that is expected to continue.

"We are going to become a more diverse country, but we are going to be diverse in different ways, in different regions," Frey said. "The West will have a much stronger Mexican and Latin flavor.

"In the South, the black population is moving back, but it is not growing nearly as fast as the Asian and Hispanic population. The South will become more multi-ethnic. In the Northeast, Midwest and Plains states, you will see more of the aging white population."

The Census Bureau estimates are not a crystal ball, said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer with the Urban Institute, a social-policy and research organization in Washington.

For example, the projections assume fairly rigid racial and ethnic categories and do not account for the impact of a growing number of mixed marriages. The children of those marriages may not identify with the racial and ethnic labels of their parents.

"The history of 100 years of immigration in the United States shows high rates of intermarriage across ethnic groups," Passel said. "What were hard-and-fast lines between groups have disappeared, so it's kind of hard to say what will happen."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

E-mail this article

Print this article

Search archive

More nation & world headlines...