Washington Post (The Fix)
By Janell Ross
September 28, 2015
America
is a much more diverse country — in every region — than it was during
the last century. That's largely due to the nearly record-topping share
of the country's
population that is comprised of immigrants, from areas of the world in
which people were once forbidden to migrate to the United States. These
trends, taken together, have transformed the makeup of the U.S.
population — and with it, what many American cities
(and television screens and city halls) look and sound like.
Those
are the findings of a new report released by the Pew Research Center on
Monday. The bottom line is this: The American demographic landscape has
shifted considerably.
The
number of immigrants who call the United States home has never been
higher, and the percentage who are immigrants is higher than it's been
in more than a century.
The foreign-born comprise nearly 14 percent of the nation's total
population; that's the most since European immigrants flooded into the
United States in the 1890s.
And
changes in the country's immigration laws have boosted the number of
migrants coming from Asia, Africa and the Middle East — parts of the
world from which migration
was at points banned or consciously limited by 19th- and
early-20th-century lawmakers who wanted to maintain a population that
was primarily Western European in origin.
Changing Immigrant Landscape Graphic
At
the same time, a downturn in the U.S. economy and boosted fortunes in
some parts of Latin America have stemmed the tide of legal and
undocumented immigrants entering
the United States from the region, including Mexico. Illegal migration
to the United States peaked a decade ago, in 2005.
Today,
Asian — and in particular, highly educated Southeast Asian — immigrants
are now on track to become the nation's largest immigrant group. These
immigrants, along
with refugees and undocumented immigrants, have laid down roots in
regions of this country that until the 1990s had not seen many
immigrants in nearly 100 years.
For
added detail about the way that the population has changed in your
state, consider moving the timeline and reviewing Pew's interactive
national map here.
This
collection of "new Americans" is responsible for the majority of the
nation's population growth. Put another way: If current immigration and
birthrates continue at
roughly the same rate in the years between 2015 and 2065, the children
of immigrants are expected to account for 88 percent of the U.S.
population increase, or 103 million people, according to the Pew report.
And whites (or any other racial or ethnic group)
won't comprise the nation's majority by about the middle of this
century. The Pew report puts that date at 2055.
Pew's
team of experienced population researchers arrived at these conclusions
after poring over birth, death and migration data. So yes, this is a
picture of the American
public and its future that should be regarded as far more cogent than
anything — yes, anything — offered up this year as the presidential
campaign season has begun.
But
it is also a picture that will, undoubtedly, unnerve some Americans. If
it does, consider this your please-calm-yourself warning.
In
the latter part of the 19th century, more people — with often less
education and fewer language skills — flooded into this country at a
slightly higher rate. And as
those people got jobs, set up homes and built families and entire lives
in the United States, they managed all manner of other things that
presumably contributed to the sense that this country was once great.
If that historical context does not calm whatever level of xenophobia might be inside you, then this should:
America's
changing demographics will never be returned to the place in which
white Americans will maintain a comfortable numerical majority — not via
any kind of immigration
reform nor any brand of mass deportation. We are well past the point
that such a transformation is even possible. It's now a matter of when,
not if.
(A
note here: GOP front-runner Donald Trump's call for an 18-month program
of mass and absolute deportations would require the country to
identify, find and then remove
more than 20,000 people per day. And, barring some sort of change in
the Constitution, this would still leave in place some of the
American-born progeny of undocumented immigrants, as well as the
fast-growing American-born Latino and Asian populations.)
William
Frey, a Rice University demographer who led the Census Bureau during
George W. Bush's tenure in the White House, has told me more than once
that this is the statistical
reality that America simply must face.
Frey
does not mean to suggest that you should be kind and welcoming to your
new American neighbors. He doesn't even mean that the population is
changing in a way that
there probably aren't many more successful campaigns for public office
that can be built around the idea that different policies and practices
could somehow make the country look, feel and sound like it did in
1950. The former is debatable; the latter is
not.
White
Americans, as has been often repeated but is worth noting here, are not
just a shrinking part of the American population, but also its
electorate. Some of that is
due to birth rates, immigration and deaths, and some of that can only
be explained by examining something almost never mentioned — that the
share of white Americans who actually vote in presidential elections has
been shrinking since 2004. That's a choice
white voters are making.
What
Frey means is this: The United States is a country that has for two
centuries ultimately accepted a long list of policies and practices that
reserve the bulk of its
best schools and neighborhoods, health care and housing, jobs and wages
for white Americans. This is the American way that will simply have to
change in the face of a United States whose makeup is rapidly changing.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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