Census shows area’s Hispanic population dropping
Despite being a nation of immigrants, the United States has had a long, troubled history with immigration, even though immigrants fought our wars, built our railroads and enriched our culture.
All too often, the conflict over immigration has had to do with ethnicity.
Anti-Irish riots roiled Philadelphia in 1844 and signs reading “Irish need not apply” filled cities across the country.
Nevertheless, the Irish fleeing the potato famine populated the Union Army in the Civil War and built the canals along the Schuylkill River and the nation’s railroads under grueling conditions.
In 1902, the Chinese Exclusion Act made permanent a law first enacted in 1882 and was the first U.S. law implemented to prevent a specific ethnic group from immigrating to the United States. It was not repealed until 1943. During World War I, anti-German sentiment was so strong, the Justice Department, preparing a list of all German aliens, counted about 480,000 of them, more than 4,000 of whom were imprisoned in 1917-18 on suspicion of espionage — all while Theodore Roosevelt denounced “hyphenated Americanism.”
These days, when the subject of “immigration policy” is raised, the target of those discussions are more often than not, Hispanics (although Syrian and Muslim refugees from the Middle East may soon overtake Hispanics as the prime topic of discussion).
After all, no one is discussing building a wall along the Canadian border.
This focus on Hispanics is no doubt being driven, in part, by the fact that U.S. Census projections show that in the near future, nonHispanic whites will no longer represent a majority of the U.S. population.
According to the Pew Research Center, “among the projected 441 million Americans in 2065, 78 million will be immigrants and 81 million will be people born in the U.S. to immigrant parents.”
Although non-Hispanic whites will remain the largest racial or
This chart of U.S. Census estimates for 2015 shows that the Hispanic population, and the percentage of the Hispanic population in Berks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties has dropped in the past year.