By IANS
Washington : The share of Asians in the US population is expected to rise to nine percent by 2050 and whites will be reduced to a minority for the first time, according to latest projections.
The Hispanics will account for 29 percent, and with the blacks remaining stagnant at 13 percent, the whites will be reduced to a minority at 47 percent for the first time, according to projections by a major ‘fact tank’ here.
Asian Americans will have almost doubled by 2050, from five to nine percent. The figures for Indian Americans are not given separately but their number is estimated to be three million currently.
If current trends continue, immigrants arriving from 2005 to 2050 and their descendants will account for 82 percent of the population growth in the US in that period, according to projections released Monday by the Pew Research Centre, which generates information on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the country.
While the total population grows from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million in 2050, 67 million will be immigrants themselves and 50 million will be their US born children or grandchildren.
The Latinos or Hispanics – a term for Spanish speaking people – are already the nation’s largest minority group at 14 percent. They will grow to 29 percent in 2050 and account for most of the population growth.
The report projects a higher rate of immigration than do a number of federal agencies but concludes, as they do, that the share of black residents will be about the same as now in 2050, roughly 13 percent.
Further, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites will shrink below half of the total, to 47 percent, slumping from 67 percent in 2005.
The Pew Centre’s population growth numbers are higher than those of the census, which calculated a population of 420 million in 2050. The researchers said that is because the census projects lower immigration numbers.
The centre also projects that the foreign-born share of the work force will increase to 23 percent by 2050 from 15 percent in 2005; the Hispanic share will more than double, to 31 percent.
Sometime from 2020 to 2025, the foreign-born will account for 15 percent of the nation’s people. Immigrants were about 12 percent of the population in 2005, an estimated 14.7 percent in 1910 and just under 15 percent in the late 19th century.
Further, because baby boomers – those born between 1946-1964 – will swell the ranks of the elderly, the number of people below 18 and above 64 will rise to 72 percent of the population by 2050, from about 59 percent in 2005.
Underlining the importance of immigration, the study found that were immigration to be halved, there would be 75 seniors and children per 100 working-age adults. With immigration 50 percent higher, there would be 69 dependents per 100 of those in the working-age group.
“A higher number of elderly or children relative to the number of workers translates into higher costs per worker to pay for all government programmes, including those targeted at the young and old such as schools and Social Security,” said the analysis, based on fertility and death rates and immigration trends.
The authors of the report did not touch on the impact of illegal immigrants, who now make up about 30 percent of the foreign-born in the US. Nor did they try to go into possible changes in immigration policies or how people will identify themselves ethnically and racially in coming decades.