The U.S. is projected to have no racial or ethnic group as its majority within the next several decades, but that day apparently is already here for the nation’s youngest children.
The sharp decline in U.S. births after the onset of the Great Recession—especially among Hispanics—has slowed the nation’s transition to a majority-minority youth population.
Two years ago, the Census Bureau announced the nation had reached a new demographic tipping point. But new data shows that tipping point may not have arrived yet.
The Census Bureau has released new U.S. population projections that assume a markedly lower level of growth than the agency predicted in the previous projections in 2008. Most of the reduced growth is due to lower projected immigration, but the bureau also forecast lower birth rates than it previously assumed.
A new Pew Research Center report concludes that the decline in birth rates and number of births from 2007 to 2010 was led by immigrant women. Overall birth rates declined 8% during this period, but birth rates for immigrant women plunged 14%. Overall numbers of births declined 7% from 2007 to 2010, but births to immigrant mothers fell by 13%. Despite these decreases, foreign-born mothers still account for a disproportionate share of births–23% in 2010, greater than the 17% share of women of childbearing age who are immigrants.
The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession. The overall U.S. birth rate, which is the annual number of births per 1,000 women in the prime childbearing ages of 15 to 44, declined 8% from […]
The nation’s racial and ethnic minority groups—especially Hispanics—are growing more rapidly than the non-Hispanic white population, fueled by both immigration and births.
Nearly one-in-five American women ends her childbearing years without having borne a child, compared with one-in-ten in the 1970s. While childlessness has risen for all racial and ethnic groups, and most education levels, it has fallen over the past decade for women with advanced degrees.
Today’s mothers of newborns are older and better educated than their counterparts in 1990, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of data from the National Center for Health Statistics and U.S. Census Bureau. They are less likely to be white and less likely to be married.