In the most predictable demographic revolution ever, the Census Bureau reported that nonwhite babies now make up a majority of all births.
This shift was inevitable as long as the basic architecture of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act remained in place. It ended the old system of per-country quotas and -- together with subsequent liberalizations -- unleashed a flood of immigration from Latin America and Asia. So long as about a million new immigrants entered the country every year, a demographic transformation was ensured as a matter of mathematics.
By 2010, the immigrant population was 40 million, following the highest decade in immigration in our history. According to the Center for Immigration Studies, the immigrant population had doubled since 1990, nearly tripled since 1980, and quadrupled since 1970. Hispanics went from about 4 percent of the population in the mid-1960s to 16 percent in 2010.
Ted Kennedy and other architects of the 1965 law predicted that nothing much would come of the law's changes. "Our cities will not be flooded with a million immigrants annually," Kennedy insisted, and "the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset." Forty-five years later, Hispanics are roughly 26 percent of all births, blacks 15 percent, and Asians 4 percent.
These categories aren't quite as clear-cut as advertised. About half of Hispanics identify their race as white on the census, a phenomenon that was neglected until the New York Times started calling George Zimmerman a "white Hispanic," apparently on grounds that an unambiguously Hispanic man couldn't possibly be involved in a racially charged shooting of a young black man. READ MORE
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