Census shows US white population declining fast

The number of white Americans has declined fast in recent years and the population growth in the US is driven entirely by minority communities, according to new data by the US Census Bureau.

The data released on Thursday showed that non-Hispanic whites make up about 58 percent of the American population, the figure has fallen under the 60 percent mark for the first time since the United States was established 1776, The Hill reported.  

The previous consensuses show how fast the white population is decreasing in the US. According to the 2000 census, non-Hispanic whites made up just more than 69 percent of the American population, and 63.7 percent in 2010.

Experts and demographers said much of the drop in the white population stems from an aging demographic that is producing fewer children later in life.

“Whites, no matter how you count them, declined since 2010,” said William Frey, a senior demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Hispanic or Latin Americans have grown steadily to 62.1 million, or 18.7 percent of the population, up from 12.6 percent in 2000 and 16.4 percent in the 2010 count. About three-quarters of the increase came from people in the United States who gave birth, while only a quarter of the increase was due to new migrants entering the country, according to earlier estimates.

In the last decade, Asian Americans grew faster than any other minority group, to 24 million, up about 20 percent since 2010. However, most of the growth was from immigration.

“The U.S. population is much more multiracial and much more racially and ethnically diverse than we measured in the past,” said Nicholas Jones, director of race, ethnicity and outreach in the Census Bureau’s Population Division.

Overall, the population growth has slowed down in America. It is the slowest in the nation’s history. The country’s population grew by 7.4 percent in the last decade, a slower rate than any decade since the 1930s.

In the last decade, more people died than were born in more than half of American counties. And while rural areas were suffered natural decreases, urban areas experienced declines too.

A senior demographer in the Census Bureau’s Population Division Marc Perry said 52 percent of counties ended the decade with lower populations than they had in 2010.

Kenneth Johnson, a senior demographer at the Carsey School at the University of New Hampshire, said the population declines are troubling indicators of long-term loss because those trends rarely reverse. 

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“Once natural decrease begins it is almost certain to continue,” Johnson said. “Many [counties that lost population] no longer have the demographic resilience to grow again and recent data suggests that population losses in this decade will be substantial.”

According to demographers, there are several reasons for the declining white population, and the slow population growth overall: Birth rates declined to their lowest rates in generations in the years after the Great Recession, and they never truly recovered. Women of child-bearing age have tended to have children later, and to have fewer children overall, than their counterparts in earlier years.

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