Nonwhites are now a majority among U.S. youths
New Census Bureau figures signal a demographic shift.
ORLANDO, Fla. — For the generation of Americans not yet old enough to drive, the demographic future has arrived.
For the first time, nonwhite and Hispanic people were a majority of people under age 16 in 2019, an expected demographic shift that will grow over the coming decades, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau on Thursday.
“We are browning from bottom up in our age structure,” said William Frey, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “This is going to be a diversified century for the United States, and it’s beginning with this youngest generation.”
At the same time, the number of non-Hispanic white people in the U.S. has gotten smaller in the last decade as deaths surpassed births in this aging demographic, according to the Census Bureau population estimates.
The decline has been accelerating in the last three years, with the number of non-Hispanic white people dropping by more than half a million from 2016 to 2019, according to the estimates.
In 2019, a little less than 40% of the U.S. population was either nonwhite or Hispanic. Non-Hispanic white people are expected to be a minority of the U.S. population in about 25 years.
A natural decrease from the number of deaths exceeding births, plus a slowdown in immigration to the U.S., contributed to the population drop since 2010 for non-Hispanic white people, whose median age of 43.7 last year was by far the highest of any demographic group. If these numbers hold for the 2020 census being conducted right now, it will be the first time since the first decennial census in 1790 that there has been a national decline of white people, Frey said.
“It’s aging. Of course, we didn’t have a lot of immigration — that has gone down,” Frey said. “White fertility has gone down.”
In fact, the decrease in births among the white population has led to a dip in the overall number of people under age 18 in the last decade, a drop exacerbated by the fact that the much larger millennial cohort has aged out of that group, replaced by a smaller Generation Z.
Over the last decade, Asians had the biggest growth rate of any demographic group, increasing by almost 30%. Almost twothirds of that growth was driven by international migration.
The Hispanic population grew by 20% since 2010, with almost three-quarters of that growth coming from a natural increase that comes when more people are born than die.
The Black population grew by almost 12% over the decade, and the white population increased by 4.3%.
The number of seniors has swelled since 2010 as baby boomers aged into that demographic, with the number of people over 65 increasing by more than a third. Seniors in 2019 made up more than 16% of the U.S. population, compared with 13% in 2010.
In four states — Maine, Florida, West Virginia and Vermont — seniors accounted for 20% of the population. That’s a benchmark the overall U.S. population is expected to reach by 2030.
“The first baby boomers reached 65 years old in 2011,” said Luke Rogers, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Branch. “No other age group saw such a fast increase.”