America 2050: population change threatens the dream - life - 19 September 2012 - New Scientist
The US is at a crossroads. Its future depends on the interwoven fates of two main groups: an ageing population of European extraction and a growing and mostly youthful population of Latin American ancestry. Unless they help each other out, warn leading demographers, the economic success that underpins the American dream may be under threat.
New Scientist's analyses of US Census Bureau data reveal large and stubbornly persistent disparities in wealth and educational achievement. If these are not narrowed, predicted population change could undermine the US's future prosperity. But the nation may yet avoid a cycle of decline – if it improves educational opportunities for young Hispanics.
At this year's Democrat and Republican conventions, the presidential candidates talked a lot about how voters were making a choice for a better future. They did not say much about the challenges posed by demography, however.
Perhaps they should have attended the annual meeting of the Population
Association of America, held in San Francisco in May. The association's president, Daniel Lichter of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, delivered a sobering address, warning: "Our failure to effectively address policy questions of persistent racial and ethnic economic inequality… may lead to new cultural and economic fragmentation."
Some researchers believe that Lichter paints an unduly pessimistic picture. But even the optimists agree that today's decisions will have far-reaching consequences. "We're really at a watershed moment in American society," says Richard Alba, a sociologist at the City University of New York.
Demographic transition is now under way (see diagram). In illustrating the US Census Bureau projections for 2050, New Scientist chose a scenario with relatively low rates of future immigration. Yet despite the political heat surrounding this issue, a similar picture will emerge whatever happens at the US border.
See our interactive graphic: "The changing face of America"
Immigration, especially from Mexico, has been the main driver of growth in the US Hispanic population so far. But net movement across the US-Mexico border is currently close to zero. Even if the US economy picks up, immigration will not return to its 1990s peak. Family planning policies mean that Mexico's birth rate has plummeted, so there will be fewer people leaving to find work.
With most groups in the US population reproducing at less than the rate needed to replace their numbers, higher fertility rates among Hispanics in the US should be sufficient to drive the transition towards a population increasingly characterised by young Hispanics and older, non-Hispanic whites.
How important is the melting pot?
Intermarriage with the white majority, it is often said, is the final stage of assimilation into US society for a minority ethnic group.
Hispanics have a higher rate of such intermarriage than similarly disadvantaged African Americans. And some of the children of these marriages merge into the white population. Stephen Trejo at the University of Texas at Austin has found that only about two-thirds of 16- and 17-year-olds with one Mexican parent identify themselves as Mexican, according to the US Census question on Hispanic origin (Journal of Labor Economics, doi.org/dkrbpq).
Since the 1990s, however, the trend of increasing intermarriage between US Hispanics and whites has reversed. According to Daniel Lichter of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, that seems to have been driven by second-generation US Hispanics reconnecting to their culture by marrying new immigrants (Sociological Forum, doi.org/b5dbv9). If so, reduced migration from Mexico could drive the rate of intermarriage up once more.
Still, Trejo suggests that the US should not rely on the melting pot of intermarriage to narrow the gaps in opportunity afflicting Hispanics. "It'll temper the problem a bit, but it's not going to solve it," he warns.
for freedom now they got it they don't want it.
how would making a separate race-related forum (for the trolling race topics at least) cut down on your Coli posting freedom?
that's extremely rare and only malc does that
