House Republicans Bury Their Heads in the Demographic Sand
by Ange-Marie Hancock and Manuel Pastor
Posted: 05/25/2012 1:27 pm
With Census data confirming that non-Hispanic white parents produced less than half of all births from July 2010 to July 2011, we are getting that much closer to what demographers have called a "tipping point:" the year 2042, when the non-white population becomes the majority throughout the United States.
What happens between now and then -- and how do we as a nation respond to these changes? While this question will be the subject of debate in coming months and years, one bit of preparation seems obvious: we shouldn't ignore the data and bury our heads in the demographic sand.
Unfortunately, that seems to be the strategy behind the Republican House 's recent vote to cut funding for the American Community Survey (ACS).
The ACS is the annual questionnaire that yields the sort of detailed information that allows us to understand population shifts and project the future.
Led by Tea Party activists, the House's rationale for the funding cut was a mix of cost and privacy concerns -- but it feels a lot more like hoping that a lack of data will erase the future reality of a fundamentally altered electorate.
It won't. And given our need to understand present and future realities, we can't afford not to fund the ACS.
Indeed, one reason why the ACS and other data sources are important is that they help us understand the dynamics of change. For example, it is not immigration driving these new numbers -- immigration has, in fact, slowed dramatically and is likely to slow further, particularly given the dramatic decline in fertility in Mexico. Rather, it is the rise of a U.S.-born second generation. Fact-based strategies that use detailed longitudinal information generated from the multi-year ACS can help us recognize that successfully integrating immigrants is both possible and crucial to our economic and social future.
The ACS also helps us fully comprehend one of the unspoken implications of becoming a "majority-minority" nation -- everyone will be a minority. Relationships between traditional "minority" groups are already as important as relationships between whites and the rest of America. In a country where race is often seen in a binary fashion, this is a sea change. Using detailed ACS data to determine where this change is occurring most dramatically, to carefully break out subgroups, and to track group experiences will be critical to forging positive (albeit more complex) race relations.
We in California know how important this is. The Golden State became majority-minority back in 1999 and our own County of Los Angeles crossed that threshold back in 1987. Bumpy times ensued but we have found that rooting the conversation about the realities of tomorrow in the data of today can sometimes make a big difference...
For the full article, go to:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/angemarie-hancock/house-republicans-bury-th_b_1546258.html
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