Nonwhite population up amid demographic shifts
ORLANDO — For the generation of Americans not yet old enough to drive, the demographic future has arrived.
For the first time, nonwhites and Latinos 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 nonLatino whites in the U.S. has gotten smaller in the past decade as deaths surpassed births in this aging demographic, according to the Census Bureau population estimates.
Since 2010, the number of whites who aren’t Latino had dropped by more than 16,600 people. But the decline has been escalating in the past three years, with the number of non-Latino whites dropping by more than a half million people from 2016 to 2019, according to the Census Bureau population estimates.
In 2019, a little under 40% of the total U.S. population was either nonwhite or Latino. Non-Latino whites 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 nonLatino whites, 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 whites, 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.”
Over the past decade, Asians had the biggest growth rate of any demographic group, increasing by almost 30%, while the Latino population grew by 20% since 2010.
The Black population grew by almost 12% over the decade, while the white population increased by 4.3%.