From Why We’re Polarized (Ezra Klein, 2020) pp104-5
The government predicts that in 2030, immigration will overtake new births as the dominant driver of population growth. About fifteen years after that, America will phase into majority-minority status — for the first time in the nation’s history, non-Hispanic whites will no longer make up a majority of the population.
That cross will come in part because America’s black, Hispanic, Asian, and mixed-race populations are expected to grow-indeed, the Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to roughly double by 2060 and the mixed-race population to triple. Meanwhile, the non-Hispanic white population is, uniquely, expected to fall, dipping from 199 million in 2020 to 179 million in 2060. The Census Bureau minces no words here: “The only group projected to shrink is the non-Hispanic White population.”
This isn’t just a statement about the future; it’s a description of the present. The economist Jed Kolko notes that the most common age for white Americans is fifty-eight, for Asians it’s twenty-nine, for African Americans it’s twenty-seven, and for Hispanics it’s eleven.+ A report out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab found that white births are now outnumbered by white deaths in twenty-six states, up from seventeen in 2014 and four in 2004.
Meanwhile, America’s foreign-born population is projected to rise from 14 percent of the population today to 17 percent in 2060, more than 2 percentage points above the record set in 1890. The rise has been staggering in its speed: as recently as the 1970s, America’s foreign-born population was under 5 percent.
The country’s gender dynamics are also in flux. Hillary Clinton was not just the first female presidential candidate to win the popular vote but the first to be nominated by a major political party. Women now make up 56 percent of college students® and are 8 percentage points more likely than men to have earned a bachelor’s degree by age twenty-nine.
In 2018, for the first time, Americans claiming “no religion” edged out Catholics and evangelicals to be the most popular response to the General Social Survey’s question on religion.® Different ways of grouping religious sects will give you different perspectives on the decline of organized religion in America.The GSS, for instance, lists mainline Protestants and evangelical Protestants separately. But in The End of White Christian America, Robert Jones, the CEO and founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, projects the religiously unaffiliated will edge out all Protestants in 2051-“a thought that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago,” he writes.
These demographic categories interact in important ways. Jones, for instance, argues that the dominant culture in America has been white and Christian. Power, no less than oppression, is intersectional. Viewed through that lens, however, the tipping point has already happened. When Obama took office, 54 percent of the country was white and Christian. By the 2016 election, that had fallen to 43 percent. To put it even more starkly, about seven out of every ten seniors are white and Christian, compared with fewer than three in ten young adults-a trend being driven not just by demographic change but by fewer young people identifying as Christian. “These changes are big enough to feel, they’re fast enough to feel,” says Jones.
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