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May 24, 2007
The Next Big Headline: Most Births Minority in 2011.
The number of non-white
Americans
exceeded 100 million for the first time in 2006,
according to a just released Census Bureau report.
According to the latest
figures,
non-Hispanic whites accounted for 66.4 percent of
U.S. population on July 1, 2006. Minorities were 33.6
percent of the total. As
recently as 1990, 76 percent of Americans called
themselves
non-Hispanic white. In 1965, the American
population was 88 percent white.
This shift is essentially
all caused by public policy—specifically, the
Immigration Act of 1965 and the simultaneous
collapse of
law enforcement against illegal immigration. As a
result, the U.S. demographic balance has been completely
destabilized.
Less reported, the recent
data showed a growing
generational racial divide between the young and
older persons living in the U.S. [New
Demographic Racial Gap Emerges By Sam Roberts,
New York Times,May 17, 2007]
In 2006 white,
non-Hispanics accounted for:
 | 56 percent of persons 9 and younger |
 | 60 percent of persons 10 to 19 |
 | 67 percent of persons 20 to 64 |
 | 81 percent of persons 65 and older |
From July 1, 2005 to July
1, 2006, the white population grew by a miniscule 0.26
percent. The minority population grew by 2.42 percent.
 | If the white and minority populations continue
growing at their respective 2005-06 growth rates,
present day minorities will attain majority status
by the year 2038.
(Table 1.) (This is much earlier than the
Census Bureau projects, primarily because they
presume a reduction in legal immigration.) |
And this extrapolation does not capture the dramatic
situation into which
Washington has led the white population.
A
basic measure of fertility is the hypothetical number of
births a woman would have over her childbearing years if
she experienced the age-specific birthrates for her
group. Based on 2004 fertility rates (the latest
available), non-Hispanic white women will have 1.847
children; non-Hispanic Black women, 2.02
children; and Hispanic women, 2.82 children.[PDF]
The “replacement” rate—2.1 births per women—is
considered the value at which a group can exactly
replace itself over the course of a generation.
Fertility rates of non-Hispanic whites were 12
percent below the replacement rate in 2004. They are
expected to remain low in future decades. This will
eventually
shrink the white population.
Births to white,
non-Hispanic women have already started to fall in
absolute terms.
(Table 2) White, non-Hispanic mothers gave birth
to 2,244,288 children in 2006. That was about 28,000
fewer births than in 2005, a decline of 1.25 percent.
Over the same period
births to minority mothers rose by 2.78
percent.
In 2006 45.9 percent of
live births were to
minority mothers. That was up from 45.0 percent in
2005.
Here’s the next big
headline (you read it on
VDARE.COM first):
 | If white
births continue shrinking and minority births
growing at the present rate, minorities will account
for more than half of all births by 2011. |
By 2021 more than 60
percent of births will be to minorities (Table 2.)
Of course, if immigration
were
completely cut off now, the date at which minorities
would become the U.S. majority would be greatly
postponed—probably into the 22nd century.
And, if immigrant stock
birthrates began to decline to the American norm, as
they arguably will, it might never happen at all.
But right now, the
U.S. federal government is literally doing what the
poet Bertolt Brecht suggested only
satirically that the East German communist
government should do.
It is
dissolving the people and electing new one.
Edwin S. Rubenstein (email
him) is President of
ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis. |