This year, more babies could be born to minorities than whites in the United States, reports the Associated Press.
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It's part of the historic trend in which minorities are expected to
become the U.S. majority over the next 40 years, according to demographers.
“Census projections suggest America may become a minority-majority
country by the middle of the century,” said Kenneth Johnson, a sociology professor at the
University of New Hampshire who researched many of the racial trends in
a paper released Wednesday. “For America's children, the
future is now.”
He says immigration has boosted the
overall number of Hispanic women in their prime childbearing years. Hispanic women also tend to have more children than any other race.
According to the AP report:
* Minorities
made up 48 percent of U.S. children born in 2008, the latest census
estimates available, compared to 37 percent in 1990.
* Broken down by race, about 52 percent of babies born in 2008 were
white, compared to about 25 percent who were Hispanic, 15
percent who were black and 4 percent who were Asian. Another 4 percent were identified by
their parents as multiracial.
* Whites currently make up two-thirds of the total U.S. population,
and recent census estimates suggest minorities will overtake whites in numbers by 2050.
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.