America’s New Majority

The traditional picture of America painted by Norman Rockwell in the 1950s is fading. To be sure, whites still make up a clear majority of the U.S. population. But for the first time, minorities are giving birth to more children than whites. There are several explanations for that fact — and it will have enormous consequences for the United States.

Although we've known for a long time that this moment was coming, the impact of its arrival is in no way diminished. For the first time in U.S. history, the number of non-white births exceeded the number for whites. The latest census figures show that children of African-Americans, Latinos, Asians and mixed-race couples now makes up 50.4 percent of the total, while white births comprise just 49.6 percent.

This has enormous consequences for the United States. Although whites still make up 63 percent of the total U.S. population, that majority will gradually disappear. In addition, the average age of whites is 42 years — considerably older than, say, Latinos, who average just 27 years. It's only a matter of time before whites will no longer represent a majority of the U.S. population. In Washington, D.C., as well as in the states of California, Hawaii, New Mexico and Texas, that's already the case.

There are various explanations for the increase in non-white births. Since the heyday of European immigration around the end of the 19th century and into the early 20th century, white immigration has steadily lessened. Since the 1970s, on the other hand, immigration from Latin American and Asian nations has steadily increased. Today, 12 million Mexicans, one-tenth of Mexico's entire population, live in the United States. Added to this is the fact that the birth rate among minority women is considerably higher than among white American women.

Since the onset of the economic crisis and the introduction of harsher measures to prevent illegal immigration, the trend has changed somewhat. The U.S. has become noticeably less attractive, especially to Mexicans. Not only has the influx of Mexicans dropped sharply, millions of Mexicans have returned to their native country. But that will not have much influence on demographics in America: Between 2000 and 2012, the number of Latino babies born in the U.S. had already surpassed the number of Latin American immigrants.

The fading of Norman Rockwell's painting of traditional America in the 1950s coupled with the superimposition of a more complex and heterogeneous reality will demand a lot from the nation. New laws aimed at illegal immigration like those enacted in Arizona, along with the deep and persistent hatred for an African-American president still apparent in many segments of the population, are but two symptoms of the problems yet to come.

But the larger question is how the minorities (who will soon comprise the majority) might better be absorbed and integrated into U.S. society. Only 18 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Latinos have a college degree, while 31 percent of whites have higher education credentials. The chances for socioeconomic advancement — long the basis for the “American Dream” — are better today in Europe than they are in the United States. The American middle class is becoming less affluent and is having more difficulty getting the money necessary to educate their children. And the immigrant children trying to claw their way upward out of poverty will someday have another problem: They'll have to come up with the money to pay the pensions of an aging community of white retirees.

Still, there's news that should make Americans happy: Professor Dowell Myers of the University of Southern California says, “If the U.S. depended on white births alone, we’d be dead.”