Texas’ demographic change is inevitable — and nothing to fear

Americans who share President Donald Trump’s vision for “making America great again” received some terrible news this week, courtesy of the United

States Census Bureau: Demographic change is unstoppable, in the nation’s largest red state. Texas has been a “majority-minority” state for more than a decade, and demographers have been predicting for at least that long that it will eventually be a state with a Hispanic majority. New Census estimates show that the change is happening faster than anticipated. Since 2010, the bureau reported, the state’s non-Hispanic white population has grown by nearly half a million people. The Latino population, however, has grown by roughly 2 million, and Hispanics will be the largest demographic group in the state by 2022.

Between July 2017 and July 2018, the differential growth rate was even more extreme: Texas added nine Latino residents for every additional Anglo who was born in or moved to the state.

Such changes have sweeping implications for the state — and the nation. Trump, who formally launched his bid for re-election Tuesday, hasn’t celebrated these demographic changes. And although Trump carried the state’s electoral votes by a ninepoint margin in 2016, his campaign is treating Texas as a battleground in 2020.

Those two points are related. Texas Republican leaders such as George W. Bush and Rick Perry were explicitly in favor of inclusivity, both as Texans and as Republicans; it has been clear since the 1990s that Republicans cannot continue to win statewide in Texas if the electorate becomes racially polarized.

That tradition has been threatened of late. Trump’s electoral strategy in 2016 hinged on turning out white voters in the Rust Belt states. This time around, he’s trying to build a bigger tent. On Tuesday, Vice President Mike Pence will travel to Miami to

launch a “Latinos for Trump” initiative, similar to one meeting in The Woodlands this weekend.

Still, Republicans don’t seem particularly optimistic about their prospects of competing in communities of color. Texas leaders have, for example, been silent about the Trump administration’s plan to include a citizenship question on the 2020 census — even though such a question could lead to an undercount that would cost the state billions of dollars in federal matching funds,

as well as a potential additional seat in Congress.

From a partisan perspective, then, this week’s news from the Census Bureau might be alarming. And although white Texans would probably not like to admit this, some might be unsettled by the prospect of no longer being members of the state’s largest ethnic group.

Let me put these numbers in context, then, because such statistics can be a bit misleading, especially if juxtaposed with headlines about the ongoing crisis on our southern border, and Trump’s tweets about immigration.

Texas is a young, growing and diversifying state. Since 2010, our population has grown by approximately 14 percent, from 25.1 million to 28.7 million people. Our median age is roughly 35, compared with a national median of 38.

And ethnicity in Texas is correlated with age. According to the Annie E. Casey Foundation, nearly half of Texas adults are white, but the same is true of only a third of state residents under age 18. That helps explain why the state has added 214,736 Latino residents over the past year, per the Census, but only 24,075 whites.

Some of those newly minted Texans are immigrants, of course, and some are domestic migrants. A majority of them, however, are babies —like my youngest nephew, for example, who was born in December in San Antonio; his mother is Latina and his father, my brother, is Anglo.

If you’re a white Texan under age 40 or so, you’ve always been a member of an ethnic minority within your age cohort, even though Anglos were a majority of the state population until relatively recently. If it doesn’t seem that way, it’s because white people continue to wield disproportionate influence and power in the state, as well as the country.

In other words, the headlines this week have been correct to say that Texas is experiencing demographic change, but the change in question isn’t new, or alarming.

Put differently, what the Census Bureau’s population estimates show us is simply that Texas’ population is growing.

And that’s something all Texans can celebrate — even if Trump insists on fearmongering about demographic change.