Births to Minorities Are Approaching Majority in U.S.

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By SAM ROBERTS

In the latest sign of the nation’s shifting racial and ethnic composition, births to Asian, black and Hispanic women in the United States are on the verge of surpassing births to non-Hispanic whites.

Minorities accounted for 48 percent of all births in the nation in the 12 months ending July 2008. While it will most likely take years for health statisticians to confirm precisely when the 50 percent benchmark will have been reached, demographers said it could occur this year. Depending on variables like the recession, which has depressed birth rates, it will almost certainly happen within a year or two, they said.

“It looks like ‘majority’ births would drop below 50 percent around 2012,” said Carl Haub, senior demographer for the Population Reference Bureau.

As recently as 1990, non-Hispanic whites accounted for almost two-thirds of births.

The Census Bureau has estimated that minorities will constitute a majority of the nation’s overall population in about three decades and a majority of Americans under age 18 in about one decade.

Since 2000 alone, the proportion of people under age 20 who are non-Hispanic whites dipped to 57 percent, from 61 percent. In 2008, Asian, black and Hispanic children already made up 47 percent of the population under 5 years old.

A study released this week by Professors Kenneth M. Johnson of the University of New Hampshire and Daniel Lichter of Cornell University explored why younger Americans are at the forefront of racial and ethnic changes and what those changes augur, compared with a generation ago.

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“The social and economic realities of children had deteriorated, while the circumstances of the elderly had improved,” they write in the journal Population and Development Review. “Will America’s older, largely white population — through the ballot box and collective self-interest — support young people who are now much different culturally from themselves and their own children? Will they vote, for example, to raise taxes for schools that serve young people of ethnic backgrounds different from theirs?”

Even though immigration has declined from earlier projections, other variables are contributing to the racial and ethnic shift.

Among them are a decline in the number of non-Hispanic white and even black children; white and Asian birthrates below the replacement level, which magnifies the impact of higher Hispanic birthrates and immigration; and declining numbers of non-Hispanic white women of child-bearing age (down 6 percent since 2000), while the number of Hispanic women in that category climbed 21 percent. There were about 10 Hispanic births in a recent year for each Hispanic death.

“The big drop in white child-bearing age is probably only beginning to be fully felt in the number of white births, so they may drop more,” said Professor Johnson, who is the senior demographer at New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute. “In contrast, the rapid rise in the number of minority women — especially Hispanics — is likely to push minority births up.”

The vast majority of children in the three major minority groups are not immigrants, and the share of Hispanic children who were born abroad may have peaked. Still, only 39 percent of Hispanic children under 4 years old have two native-born parents.