The announcement on Thursday that minorities collectively will make up a majority of people in America by 2042 comes at a contentious moment in U.S. history. A bitter and largely negative debate about immigration roils the country. Stoked by angry politicians, the shouting rarely goes beyond variations on the theme of how to send 12 million illegal immigrants back home. Hardly anybody acknowledges that 38 million legal immigrants and their 31 million children already call America home. These people, along with other minorities, will be a powerful force in shaping America’s future.

Word to the wise: The future is here; get used to it. The changing demographics and the story that they tell are cause for pride, not panic. America is growing richer in its diversity: Immigrants and minorities will continue to assimilate into the U.S. culture, just as they always have. They will bring fresh ideas, new perspectives, energy and vitality with them.

The census update says that non-Hispanic whites will make up less than half of the U.S. population by 2042, about nine years earlier than previously predicted. The change will be largely driven by Hispanics, whose numbers will nearly triple to 133 million, or about 30 percent of the 2042 population. Asians will nearly double to 9 percent of the population, compared to 5 percent today. Blacks will increase slightly to 15 percent from 13 percent. And far more people will identify themselves as mixed-race, up to 16 percent from 4 percent.

Immigration will continue to contribute to the increasing diversity, but the numbers are mostly being driven by birth and death ratios. Non-Hispanic whites are older, dying more and having fewer babies. Hispanics are younger and, consequently, producing more babies.

What does it all mean? For those of us in South Florida, Los Angeles, parts of Texas and other places, the future America looks like our present. As we have, America will learn how to work, play, educate, build, love, fight and celebrate across ethnic and racial lines. The country will learn to vote using multi-language ballots, decipher cultural differences in medical care, teach children in many languages, make justice equal for all.

Anyone who fears the change that is coming should understand that our country has been in a constant state of flux since it was founded, embracing British, Italians, Irish, Jews, Africans, Spanish, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Cubans, Haitians and others. Diversity has made America strong, current proof of which is on display at the Beijing Olympics. We should continue to welcome and embrace it.

Source The Miami Herald

Popularity: 12% [?]

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

The latest figures, which are being released on Thursday, are predicated on current and historical trends, which can be thrown awry by several variables, including prospective overhauls of immigration policies and sudden increases in refugees.

A decade ago, census demographers estimated that the nation’s population, which topped 300 million in 2006, would not surpass 400 million until sometime after midcentury. Now, they are projecting that the population will top 400 million in 2039 and reach 439 million in 2050.

So-called minorities, the Census Bureau projects, will constitute a majority of the nation’s children under 18 by 2023 and of working-age Americans by 2039.

For the first time, both the number and the proportion of non-Hispanic whites, who now account for 66 percent of the population, will decline, starting around 2030. By 2050, their share will dip to 46 percent.

Higher mortality rates among older native-born white Americans and higher birthrates rates among immigrants and their children are already driving ethnic and racial disparities.

“A momentum is built into this as a result of past immigration,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. “In the 1970s, ’80s and ’90s, there were more Hispanic immigrants than births. This decade, there are more births than immigrants. Almost regardless of what you assume about future immigration, the country will be more Hispanic and Asian.”

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Popularity: 11% [?]

Foreshadowing the nation’s changing makeup, one in four American counties have passed or are approaching the tipping point where black, Hispanic and Asian children constitute a majority of the under-20 population, according to analyses of census figures released Thursday.

Racial and ethnic minorities now account for 43 percent of Americans under 20. Among people of all ages, minorities make up at least 40 percent of the population in more than one in six of the nation’s 3,141 counties.

The latest population changes by race, ethnicity and age, as of July 1, 2007, were generally marginal compared with the year before. But they confirm the breadth of the nation’s diversity, and suggest that minorities — now about a third of the population — might constitute a majority of all Americans even sooner than projected by census demographers, in 2050.

In 2000, black, Hispanic and Asian children under age 20 were at or near a majority in only about one-fifth of the counties and, over all, blacks, Hispanics and Asians accounted for 40 percent or more of the population in about one in seven counties.

Even with the growing diversity, all but one of the 82 counties where blacks make up a majority are in the South (except St. Louis), all but two of the 46 where Hispanics are in the majority are in the South or the West (except the Bronx and Seward, Kan., home to giant meatpacking plants), and four of the five counties with the largest proportion of Asians are in Hawaii (San Francisco rounds out the top five with 33 percent).

Except for two counties in New Mexico and South Dakota with large American Indian populations, the 10 counties with the highest proportion of minorities were along or near the Mexican border.

From 2006 to 2007, according to the bureau’s revised estimates, the counties that became majority-minority included Rockdale, near Atlanta.

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Popularity: 10% [?]

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The Hispanic population is experiencing non-stop growth here in the valley and nationwide. But it’s not because of immigration. Here in Las Vegas, according to this year’s Las Vegas Perspective, the Hispanic population is at 26-percent.

But that number is growing every day. It’s a natural increase because it’s now births that are accounting for most of the nation’s Hispanic population, not immigration.

Twenty years ago, motherhood led Heidi Herrera from Mexico, to the United States. “It was a choice because we didn’t want out kids to go through what we did. We wanted for them to have a better life, a better education.”

Today, her three children are adding to what many are calling “the Hispanic baby boom.”

“It’s a misconception that people come in, have their kids and go back to Mexico and whenever they’re older, just come over to the United States,” she said.

In seven years, the Hispanic population grew by more than 10 million people. This natural increase is something Hispanic advocate Miguel Barrientos says should come as no surprise.

“It’s a natural thing that’s happening. The Census Bureau has indicated in the year 2050, 50-percent of the population in U.S. will be Latino. This is the beginning stage of that phenomenal growth that will take place in the country,” he said.

Popularity: 18% [?]