Forget The Minority Take Over Of America

You’ve all heard how there will be more minorities in the United States by 2050 than there will be whites, right? Forget it. It’s not happening. Moreover, expect the illegal alien problem to start going away soon all on its own. Why? Because demographics don’t move in a straight line.

If you do as the left does, and you look at demographics as a straight line, then you see that 30 million Hispanics in 1980 turned into 45 million Hispanics in 2000 and will turn into 67 million in 2020 and 104 million in 2040. That, combined with blacks and Asians (groups that are not experiencing growth), results in about 50% of the population by 2050.

But that’s not how demographics work, and recent developments have shown the problem with this assumption. First, when the recession hit the United States, large numbers of Hispanics left the United States. So many in fact, that the Census Bureau had to revise its estimates downward for the future take over of the United States by a decade. They now estimate that there will be only 105.1 million Hispanics by 2050 -- a full decade later than expected.

But there’s another problem with this that hasn’t been considered yet. The key to Hispanic growth has been Mexico. Indeed, almost all of the growth in the Hispanic population in the United States has been the result of Mexicans coming to the United States. When Reagan granted an amnesty in the 1980s, there were about five million Mexicans illegally in the United States. By 2000, we’d added another 12 million. That seventeen million is more than one-third of the forty-five million Hispanics in the United States today, and it represents almost the entire growth in the Hispanic population since the 1980s.

Indeed, if you look at the map to the right, you’ll see that consistent with this, Hispanics are almost entirely concentrated along the border with Mexico.

So why does this matter? Because things are changing dramatically in Mexico.

Mexicans first started coming to the United States in vast numbers in the 1980s. There were two reasons for this. First, with the end of the oil boom, Mexico’s economy tanked. At the same time, the American economy boomed. Thus, with few jobs south of the border and large numbers of jobs north of the border, people fled Mexico for the United States. This was made even worse by the fact that Mexico’s economy was almost entirely dependent on the oil industry and that its government is one of the most corrupt in the world -- leading to a lack of opportunities and huge disparities in income, which creates a large underclass.

The second reason was that Mexico’s collapse coincided with a baby boom that began in the 1950s, similar to that experienced by the United States. Indeed, in the 1960s, Mexico had the highest birth rate in the world, with Mexican mothers having on average seven children each. Thus, in addition to its economic collapse, Mexico was awash in young people, who are by-their-nature more willing to emigrate to find work. These were the people who began coming in the 1980s.

So what’s changed? Mexico’s birth rate has plummeted. It is now just over 2 children per mother, almost identical to the birth rate in the United States, and it’s still falling -- it will soon be at European levels (around 1.4). Because of this, Mexico’s population is estimated to peak in 2043, though I suspect that will happen much sooner, as it has in other countries. That means that the supply of people to head north is quickly running out.

Moreover, because of this change, the population is aging much quicker, which will accelerate the decline in the number of people willing to go north. Not only is an older population less interested in emigrating, but this also means that there will be more opportunities for Mexico’s young to find solid, long-term employment. Also, a smaller, older population tends to lead to greater personal wealth because the competition for employees drives up wages. This again, reduces emigration because it makes it more profitable to remain in Mexico. It also may draw people back to Mexico, just as this recession has done, because they can do better in Mexico.

What all of this means is that there will be fewer Mexicans very soon, and fewer of them will want to come to the United States to find work. That means that American Hispanics will no longer be receiving the mega-demographic boost that illegal immigration has been providing. When you exclude those numbers, the rest of Hispanic America is growing at about the same pace as white America.

Thus, the Hispanic growth rate will soon start to fall from 50% every twenty years to around 4%, about the growth rate of everybody else.

Hence, reports of the minority take over of America have been greatly exaggerated.