 |
| | | | | REPRINTS
|
U.S. Latino Population Expected to Triple by 2050
February 12, 2008
By Della de Lafuente
NEW YORK Already the nation's largest minority group, the number of U.S. Hispanics will triple in size to 128 million by 2050, making up 29 percent of the U.S population, according to projections by the Pew Research Center.
The U.S. Hispanic population is expected to account for 60 percent of the nation's population growth by 2050, when nearly one in five Americans, or 19 percent, will be an immigrant. By 2025, the immigrant, or foreign born, share of the population will surpass the peak during the last great wave of immigration a century ago, the report's authors said.
"There are parts of the country where the population already has the characteristics we're projecting for the nation," Jeffrey S. Passel, one of the report's authors said during a Monday press briefing. "Right now, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Nevada and Hawaii have percentages of foreign-born [immigrants] that are in the range of 18 to 22 percent, and we're projecting 19 percent."
The report "U.S. Population Projections: 2005-2050," by the nonpartisan Washington, D.C.-based Pew Research Center, projects that of the 117 million people added to the population during this period as a result of new immigration, 67 million will be immigrants and 50 million will be their U.S-born children or grandchildren.
"That's been our history. [The United States] looks quite a bit different than it did 40 years ago and 40 years ago, it looked quite a bit different than it did 60 years before that," Passel said.
Overall, U.S. population will rise to 438 million in 2050, according to the projections outlined in the report by Passel and D'Vera Cohn.
About 31 percent of the U.S. working population 18 to 64 will be Latinos in 2050, per the Pew Research Center projections.
The center's projections are based on detailed assumptions about births, deaths and immigration levels, considered the three drivers of population change, as well as on recent trends, noting that trends can change over time.
The report also offers two alternative population projections, one based on lower immigration assumptions and one based on higher immigration assumptions "with immigration playing the dominant role" in each scenario, Cohn said.
"Under all scenarios, the proportion of the Hispanic population would increase substantially because it's generally younger and has higher fertility even without the larger contribution from immigration," Passel said.
Authors of the report said the center's projections differ from earlier projections by the U.S. Census Bureau, which projected an overall U.S. population of 420 million with a lower share of Hispanics based on assumptions about immigration.
The Social Security Administration's intermediate projection is significantly lower than projections by the Pew Research Center and the U.S. Census Bureau, projecting 390 million people in 2050 with a considerably lower projection for short and long-term immigration trends.
Other population projections by the Pew Research Center include:
• The major role of immigration in national growth builds on the pattern of recent decades, during which immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren accounted for most population increase. Immigration's importance increased as the average number of births to U.S.-born women dropped sharply before leveling off.
• Births in the United States will play a growing role in Hispanic and Asian population growth; as a result, a smaller proportion of both groups will be foreign-born in 2050 than is the case now.
• The non Hispanic white population will increase more slowly than other racial and ethnic groups; whites will become a minority (47 percent) by 2050.
• The nation's elderly population will more than double in size from 2005 through 2050, as the baby boom generation enters the traditional retirement years. The number of working age Americans and children will grow more slowly than the elderly population, and will shrink as a share of the total population.
• The Center's report includes an analysis of the nation's future "dependency ratio"-- the number of children and elderly compared with the number of working age Americans. There were 59 children and elderly people per 100 adults of working age in 2005. That will rise to 72 dependents per 100 adults of working age in 2050.
|
| | | | | REPRINTS
Copyright 2007 Marketing y Medios |
|
 |
|
 |
|
|
|
QuickLinks:
1-click access to topics in this article.
|
|
|
|
|
|
ADVERTISEMENT
|
|
|
