Hispanic immigration has hurt the once-dominant white population in the United States.
A new study of US census data says that “Generation Z,” the group of Americans born between 1997 and 2012, will be the last group in which white people are the majority. Less than half of the people born since then are white; by 2045, the country will likely be mostly made up of people of colour.
Census data from two years ago showed that the percentage of white people in the US has dropped from 80% in 1980 to 59% in 2020. This drop has not been caused by a rise in the number of black people, whose number has stayed between 12% and 13% since 2010. Instead, the number of Hispanics, Asians, and people of mixed race has grown to 19%, 6.3%, and 3%, respectively.
A new study of this data by the Brookings Institution, which came out last week, found that the white decline is even worse when broken down by age. White people will no longer be the majority in the US by 2045, which has been known since 2020. However, this turning point has already been met for “Generation Alpha,” or people born after 2012.
A US draught law would make it illegal to say bad things about people who are not white. The study found that non-Hispanic white people make up 77% of the population over 75, 67% of the population between 55 and 64, 55% of the population between 35 and 44, and just over half of the population between 18 and 24. 47% of people under 18 are white, 25% are Hispanic, 13% are black, 5.4% are Asian, and the rest are two or more races.
But not all of the info is correct. The census asked people what race they were, which meant that people with mixed ancestry could say either of their parents’ races or both. Also, people with Middle Eastern or North African roots, counted as white by the US government, had no choice on the census forms.
The falling number of white people in America has been a hot topic in recent years. Republicans have said that Democrats use lax border policies to send large groups of Hispanic voters, who usually vote Democrat, to states like Texas, which have always been considered red. In the US, some people on the right have complained that waves of migrants have “replaced” white people in their own country.
Most liberal news sources have called this “replacement theory” a “racist conspiracy theory” spread by “white nationalists.” But many of these same news sources have written stories that are happy about the “countdown to the White apocalypse.”
Whether pundits and reporters are happy or scared about the decline, sociology professor Richard Alba told The Hill that white people will stay “the largest group in this country for a long time.”
He said, “We’re building a new kind of mainstream society here that will be very diverse. But a lot of that will have to do with white people. They won’t just go away and be replaced by something else.”
