After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the US Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States.
Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 per cent of all births in the 12-month period ending last July, according to data published today, while minorities - including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race - reached 50.4 per cent.
Such a turn has been long expected but no one was certain when the moment would arrive - signalling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans and has wrestled mightily with issues of race, from the days of slavery, through a civil war, bitter civil rights battles and, most recently, highly charged debates over efforts to restrict immigration.
While overall, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the US economy, political life and identity.
Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority.
Whites are no longer the majority in four states, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis.
A more diverse young population forms the basis of a generational divide with the country's elderly, a group that is largely white and grew up in a world that was too.
While the increasingly diverse young population is a potential engine of growth, will it become a burden if it is not properly educated?
"The question is, how do we reimagine the social contract when the generations don't look like one another?" said Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of Immigration studies at New York University.
The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger - and to have more children – than non-Hispanic whites.
(Of the total births in the year that ended last July, about 26 per cent were Hispanic, about 15 per cent black, and about 4 per cent Asian.)
Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6 per cent, and are an overwhelming majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4 per cent. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics.
The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 - meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years. Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27.
The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92 per cent of the nation's population growth in the decade that ended in 2010, a surge that has created a very different looking America from the one of the 1950s.
The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young.
Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending.
A college degree has become the single most important building block of success in today's economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one.
"This is a polite knock on the door to tell us to get ready," said Ruy Teixeira, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. "We do a pretty lousy job of educating the younger generation of minorities. Basically, we are not ready for this."
New York Times