Are whites on the verge of becoming a minority of the US population? Some analysts of the 2010 Census results claim so. Many go on, sometimes with relish, to say that this spells electoral doom for the Republican Party.
The picture is more complicated. The GOP’s demise is no more foreordained than it was a century ago, when Italian, Jewish and Polish immigrants poured into America in proportions much greater than the Hispanic and Asian immigration of the last two decades.
The numbers do appear stark. The Census tells us that 16 percent of US residents are Hispanic, up from 13 percent in 2000 and 9 percent in 1990, and that 5 percent are Asian, up from 4 percent in 2000. The percentage of blacks held steady at 13. Among children, tomorrow’s voters, those percentages are higher.
But it’s a mistake to see blacks, Hispanics and Asians as a single “people of color” voting bloc. The 2010 exit poll shows that the GOP percentages in the vote for the US House were 60 percent among whites, 9 percent among blacks, 38 percent among Hispanics and 40 percent among Asians. Simple arithmetic says that Hispanics and Asians vote more like whites than like blacks. The picture is similar in the 2008 exit poll.
Moreover, while blacks vote similarly in almost every state, a wide variation exists among Hispanics. In 2010 governor elections, they voted 31 percent Republican in California, 38 percent Republican in Texas and 50 percent Republican in Florida (where Cubans are no longer a majority of Hispanics).
As RealClearPolitics senior analyst Sean Trende has written, Hispanics tend to vote 10 percent to 15 percent less Republican than whites of similar income and education. A more Hispanic electorate puts Republicans at a disadvantage, but not an overwhelming one.
The same is true of Asians. In 2010, Democratic Sen. Harry Reid got 79 percent from Asians in Nevada, where many are Filipinos. But the Asians in Middlesex County, NJ, most from India, seem to have voted for Republican Gov. Chris Christie in 2009.
The 2010 Census shows something else that may prove important: a slowdown of immigration since the recession began in 2007 and even some reverse migration. Census results for Hispanic-immigrant-entry points (East Los Angeles and Santa Ana, Calif., the east side of Houston, Chicago’s Pilsen neighborhood) show that the Hispanic population has dropped sharply since 2000.
One reason is the business cycle. The 2000 Census was taken on April 1, 2000, less than a month after the peak of the tech boom. Unemployment was low, immigration was high, and entry-point houses and apartments were crammed with large families.
The 2010 Census was taken after two years of recession, when immigration had slackened. We simply don’t know whether this was just a temporary response to the business cycle or the beginning of a permanent decline in migration.
Past mass migrations, which most experts expected to go on indefinitely, in fact ended abruptly. Net Puerto Rican migration to New York City stopped in 1961; the huge movement of Southern blacks to Northern cities ended in 1965. Those who extrapolate trends far into the future end up being wrong sooner or later.
Finally there is an assumption — which is strong among those who expect a majority “people of color” electorate to put Democrats in power permanently — that racial consciousness never changes. But sometimes it does.
American blacks do have common roots in slavery and segregation. But African immigrants don’t share that heritage, and Hispanics come from many countries and cultures. The Asian category includes anyone from Japan to Lebanon.
Under the definitions in use in America a century ago, when Southern and Eastern European immigrants weren’t regarded as white, America became a majority non-white nation sometime in the 1950s. By today’s definitions, we’ll become majority non-white in a few decades.
But that may not make for the vast cultural and political change some predict. Not if we assimilate newcomers, and if our political parties adapt, as we and they have done.
