The minority race in the USA in thirty years time will be White, according to figures released by the US Census Bureau. The stats show that for the third year in succession, more non-Hispanic whites had died than been born.
“This is without historical precedent,” said Kenneth Johnson, the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey School of Public Policy’s senior demographer. “The minority population is growing, and the non-Hispanic white population is not”.
William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, said at present Whites make up 62 percent of the total population but 78 percent of deaths. He said they have a median age of 43 which is an all time high, and for the first time ever, whites are a minority amongst children under the age of 5 years.
“Since 2010, the overall under age 20 population is declining, while working ages and especially seniors are growing,” Frey said.
In 46 States White populations under 20 years of age had decreased with in North Dakota, South Dakota, Utah, Hawaii, and the District of Columbia being the exceptions.
Non-Hispanic whites made up the only group where the death rates was a higher death rate than the birthrate.
Their numbers increased the slowest: from 2013 to 2014 up only 0.5 percent. , compared to 3.2 percent for Asians, 2.3 percent for native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, 2.1 percent for Hispanics, 1.4 percent for American Indians and Alaska Natives, and 1.3 percent for black people.
“I don’t think people fully appreciate how much natural increase [more births than deaths] contributes to the nation’s growing diversity,” Johnson said. “If you ask people why is America more diverse, they would say it’s because minorities are being born. What nobody ever thinks about is that a lot more whites are dying.”
Of the total U.S. population increase, minority population gains made up for 95 percent, due mainly to Asian and Hispanic and immigration, and more births.
The Census Bureau estimates showed the millennial generation, people born from 1982 to 2000, was the largest group in the U.S. They totaled 83.1 million which is one-quarter of the total population. There are almost 8 million for Millennial than baby boomers and 44 percent of them are of a minority race or ethnicity.
Five jurisdictions are already majority-minority. Texas with 56.5 percent, New Mexico at 61.1 percent, California with 61.5 percent, The District of Columbia at 64.2 percent, and Hawaii at 77 percent.
The nation’s most populated State populous state California which has 38.8 million people, and Los Angeles County had the largest numbers of Hispanic, Asian, Indian and White populations of all states or counties. From 2013 to 2014, Texas had the biggest growth in black, white and Hispanics populations.
The largest African-American population, 3.8 million, population was in New York although the largest percentage of black residents, 50.6 percent, was in the District of Columbia.
“So we are having an older white population, with whites, once again, showing a minority of births,” said Frey. “These new estimates, showing declining white births, minority white toddlers and pervasive losses in the nation’s under age 20 white population, indicate that future generations almost everywhere will be increasingly made up of minorities.”