Texas joins three states with ethnic majority

EL PASO, Texas — Texas has become the fourth state to have a non-white majority population, the U.S. Census Bureau reported today, a trend driven by a surging number of Hispanics moving to the state.

According to population estimates based on the 2000 Census, about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities. In the 2000 Census, minorities made up about 47 percent of the population.

Texas joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii as states with majority-minority populations — with Hispanics the largest group in every state but Hawaii, where it is Asian Americans.

Five other states — Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona — aren't far behind, with about 40 percent minorities.

Public-policy analysts said these states and the country as a whole need to bring minority education and professional achievement to the levels of whites. Otherwise, these areas risk becoming poorer and less competitive.

Complications from the cultural shift aren't likely to be exclusive to states that already have majority-minority populations, William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C.

Nevada, for instance, has seen a massive influx of minorities in the past 15 years, reducing the percentage of whites since the 1990s from nearly 80 percent to about 60 percent. Such a rapid shift is likely to cause growing pains that include trying to balance the needs of a bigger and younger minority community with an aging white community, Frey said.

The nation is expected to be more than half minorities by 2050, said Steve Murdock, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"If you look in the 1990s, in every one of the 50 states, non-Anglo Hispanic populations grew faster than Anglo populations," he said. "It's a very pervasive pattern."