Demographic shift amplifies inequities in U.S.
ATTITUDE ADJUSTMENT needed to make sure new majority population is educated, well-employed, out of jail and healthy
One-year-old Ka’Lani is so fascinated by a round plastic toy that she doesn’t see her mother, Ke’sha Scrivner, walk into the Martha’s Table daycare, chanting her name while softly clapping out a beat that Ka’Lani keeps with a few bounces on her bottom.
Once on welfare, Scrivner worked her way off by studying early childhood education and landing a fulltime job for the District of Columbia’s education superintendent. She sees education as the path to a better life for her and her five children, pushing them to finish high school and continue with college or a trade school.
Whether her children can beat the statistics that show lagging graduation rates for black children is important not just to her family. The success of Ka’Lani and other minority children who will form a new majority is crucial to future U.S. economic competitiveness.
A wave of immigration, the aging of non-Hispanic white women beyond child-bearing years and a new baby boom are diminishing the proportion of children who are white in the United States. Already, half of U.S. children younger than one year are Hispanic, black, Asian, Native American or of mixed races.
“A lot of people think demographics alone will bring about change and it won’t,” said Gail Christopher, who heads the W.K. Kellogg Foundation’s America Healing project on racial equity. “If attitudes and behaviours don’t change, demographics will just mean we’ll have a majority population that is lowincome, improperly educated, disproportionately incarcerated with greater health disparities.”
In 2010, 39.4 per cent of black children, 34 per cent of Hispanic children and 38 per cent of American Indian and Alaska Native children lived in poverty — defined as an annual income of $22,113 that year for a family of four. That compares with about 18 per cent of white, nonHispanic children, states the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey.
Asian children overall fare better, with 13.5 per cent living in poverty, the survey said.
The overrepresentation of minority children among the poor is not new. What is new is that minority children will, in the not-too-distant future, form the core of the U.S. workforce, and their taxes will be depended on to keep entitlement programs for the elderly solvent.
Based on where things stand for non-white children today, it’s not hard to make some educated guesses about what the future holds for the youngest of children in the U.S. who already are a majority of their age group, said Sam Fulwood III, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress.
The recent recession worsened conditions for many children, but minorities were hardest hit and are having more difficulty recovering.
The Pew Charitable Trusts found that, from 1999 to 2009, 23 per cent of black families and 27 per cent of Hispanic families experienced longterm unemployment, compared with 11 per cent of white families. Pew Research Center, a subsidiary, found that the median wealth of white households is 20 times that of black households and 18 times that of Hispanic households.
That means more minority families end up in poor neighbourhoods with underperforming school systems, leading to lower graduation rates and lower lifetime earnings, said Leonard Greenhalgh, a professor of management at Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.
“You are looking at the future workforce of the United States — what we need to be competitive against rival economies such as India and China — and we are not educating the largest, fastest growing percentage of the U.S. workforce so, as a nation, we lose competitive advantage,” Greenhalgh said.
It all starts with preschool, where overall enrolment has been increasing but Hispanic children are less likely to be included.
President Barack Obama has proposed raising cigarette taxes to help pay for preschools. He has proposed a program to entice states to expand preschool programs to reach families with incomes up to twice the poverty line, and to require full-day kindergarten. But the partisan political showdown over government spending and raising taxes has led to across-the-board federal spending cuts and stalls in other legislation that may delay those proposals.
Compounding the issue, experts say, is immigration status. About 4.5 million children of all races born in the U.S. have at least one parent not legally in the U.S., says the Pew Hispanic Center. More than two-thirds of impoverished Latino children are the children of at least one immigrant parent, the centre reported.
The picture isn’t all bleak. History and recent data show improve- ments for the next generations of immigrant families.
The Pew Research Center found second-generation Americans, some 20 million U.S.-born children of 20th century immigrants, are better off than their immigrant parents. They have higher incomes, more graduate from college and are homeowners and fewer live in poverty, the study found.
Many experts on low-income children see good health as one more building block for education and prosperity.
Children are less likely to learn if they are ill and missing school and unable to see a doctor.
While 73.1 per cent of white children had private coverage, more than half of black and Hispanic children got health care through Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Programs and similar federal and state subsidized programs, the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics reported.
“We have the increasing rates of childhood asthma, childhood obesity and these are going to lead to problems later in life, so it’s far better to make sure those kids have health insurance so you can address those issues as much as possible now,” Alker said.