AP
July 8, 2015
The long-expected moment when Latinos surpassed whites as California's largest racial or ethnic group has come and gone.
Hispanic
Californians began to narrowly outnumber white Californians sometime in
the first half of 2014, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures
released in late June.
The
state had some 14.99 million Latinos compared with about 14.92 million
non-Hispanic whites as of July 1, 2014, the most recent data available.
Together, the two groups
make up nearly 80 percent of the state's population.
Demographers had expected the shift for decades as the state's Hispanic population boomed due to immigration and birth rates.
Many
thought it would happen sooner than it did — the California Department
of Finance had predicted 2013 — but a slight decline in population
pushed it to last year.
"This
is sort of the official statistical recognition of something that has
been underway for almost an entire generation," Roberto Suro, director
of the Tomás Rivera
Policy Institute at the University of Southern California, told the Los
Angeles Times on Wednesday.
California
joins New Mexico as the second state with a Latino plurality. Hawaii,
with its large Asian population, is the third state where whites are not
the largest ethnic
group.
California
saw an immigration boom from Mexico and Central America during the
1980s, a population surge that has since moved to other states,
particularly in the Midwest
and South.
As that happened, California's Hispanic population has grown more rooted and settled.
Some
70 percent of the state's immigrants, the majority of those Latinos,
were living in the U.S. before 2000, a higher rate than any other state,
according to 2012 census
data.
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