Texas Becomes a Majority-Minority State
http://apnews.myway.com/article/20050811/D8BTJN0O0.html

Aug 11, 7:50 AM (ET)

By ALICIA A. CALDWELL


(AP)

EL PASO, Texas (AP) - Texas has become the fourth state to have a non-white majority population, the U.S. Census Bureau said Thursday, a trend driven by a surging number of Hispanics moving to the state.

According to the population estimates based on the 2000 Census, about 50.2 percent of Texans are now minorities. In the 2000 Census, minorities made up about 47 percent of the population in the second-largest state.

Texas joins California, New Mexico and Hawaii as states with majority-minority populations - with Hispanics the largest group in every state but Hawaii, where it is Asian-Americans.

Five other states - Maryland, Mississippi, Georgia, New York and Arizona - aren't far behind, with about 40 percent minorities.

Public policy analysts said these states and the country as a whole need to bring minority education and professional achievement to the levels of whites. Otherwise, these areas risk becoming poorer and less competitive.

William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., said lawmakers need to start with immigration reform, while striving to bring minorities' education and salary levels in line with Anglos.

"Immigration is good for the United States ... it's important for us to keep our doors open, but we need to keep an eye on the people coming in," Frey said. "While initially it will be a state problem, eventually it will be a national issue, and education is the best way to deal with it."

Complications from the cultural shift aren't likely to be exclusive to states that already have majority-minority populations, Frey said.

Nevada, for instance, has seen a massive influx of minorities in the last 15 years, reducing the percentage of Anglos since the 1990s from nearly 80 percent to about 60 percent. Such a rapid shift is likely to cause growing pains that include trying to balance the needs of a bigger and younger minority community with an aging Anglo community, Frey said.

"That's the kind of state that is going to have to deal with quick transition," Frey said.

Though some areas may never see this shift, the country as a whole is expected to continue the trend first noticed more than a decade ago.

The nation should be more than half minorities by 2050, said Steve Murdock, a demographer at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

"If you look in the 1990s, in every one of the 50 states, non-Anglo Hispanic populations grew faster than Anglo populations," Murdock said. "It's a very pervasive pattern."

This would be more newsworthy if there were only 2 races: white and non-white.

There was a report on the radio here this morning about the growing Hispanic population in the Chicago area and that before the next census that the non-white population here will exceed 50%.

And I thought that South Carolina had a black majority. Maybe they don't anymore, but 50 years ago they did.

For a Texan, this is like saying "the sun will rise today!". We're pretty aware.

The news isn't suprising at all given the "open door" policy to whoever wants to cross the border may do so. And I bet New Mexico, Arizona, and California aren't too far behind Texas now.

Mexico, U.S. fear retiring migrants

Eduardo Porter and Elisabeth Malkin
New York Times
Aug. 7, 2005 12:00 AM

In recent decades, millions of working-age Mexicans have entered the United States. Most of them have come illegally, taking jobs on the bottom rungs of the American labor market.

While much of the attention remains on the persistent inflow of undocumented workers, a new question is beginning to worry some analysts and policymakers on both sides of the border: What will happen when the 10 million Mexicans living in the United States become too old to work? Will they retire in the United States, or will they return to Mexico?

As they age, the choices these old-timers make could fray the social fabric on both sides of the border.

Mexico is not prepared to receive them back. With a rapidly aging population living in Mexico and virtually no public system of social security or health insurance, Mexico could hardly cope with millions of returning immigrants who spent their working lives in the United States.

"If we add to the dynamic of aging the return of Mexicans who don't have coverage," said Rodolfo Tuiran, a respected demographer who is undersecretary of social development in the Mexican government, "then we are talking about a significant problem."

But the United States is also unprepared to deal with millions of poor, aging immigrants, eking out a living without recourse to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid or most other forms of federal assistance.

In 2003, an estimated 710,000 Mexicans over 60 lived in the United States, 63 percent more than a decade earlier, the National Population Council of Mexico concluded, based on Census Bureau figures. About a quarter lived under the poverty line, a far greater share than the 10 percent of the overall elderly population who are poor.

Those numbers are expected to swell for the current generation of undocumented immigrants. Unlike earlier migrants - many of them now legal residents in the United States - today's immigrants are likely to see Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid as little more than mirages. While most have paid taxes over their working lives to these programs, under current law they are not entitled to any benefits.

"If all these people that came here are going to stay, then there is a question of what will be the social cost," said Roberto Suro, director of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington. "If they're only here for their working life, it's a bargain."

Immigration policy, however, might be unwittingly contributing to an increase in the number of older Mexicans staying in the United States, as increasingly tight border controls encourage undocumented immigrants to settle here rather than risk keeping families in Mexico and shuttling back and forth across the border.

Consider Angelita Sanchez de Valdez, who stepped into a rickety boat to cross the Rio Grande more than half a century ago, entering the United States illegally to join her husband and start a new life as a migrant farmworker. Today, Sanchez, an 83-year-old widow, is an American citizen, and Mexico, she said, "is a little bit forgotten."

Living with her daughter and son-in-law in Donna, Texas, a parched town 10 miles from the border, Sanchez receives $453 a month from Social Security plus $81 in Supplemental Security Income, intended to improve the incomes of the poor. With no private insurance and no savings, she relies heavily on her daughter's goodwill and on Medicaid to pay for prescription drugs and medical bills not covered by Medicare.

Given the nature of the movements across the border, there are no definitive statistics on return flows of older migrants to Mexico. But as the number of older immigrants starts adding up, 35 years after the flow of undocumented workers across the border started to swell, the trickle of returning old-timers is gathering momentum.

An official survey of Mexican residents in 1990 found only 11,500 over 50 who had been living in the United States in 1985. By 2000, the number of Mexicans older than 50 who had been in the United States five years earlier rose to 27,900, according to the National Population Council.

One draw pulling Mexicans back home is affordability.

"In little Mexico, the money seems like a lot," said Roselino Sebastian Castaneda, 72, who returned nine years ago to his hometown in Tierra Colorada, in the southern state of Guerrero, after 35 years shuttling from California to Texas to Louisiana to Colorado to Montana.

He knows he could never afford to live in the United States on the $350 a month he collects from Social Security, the half of his benefit not swallowed by child support for a daughter in Arizona. But in Mexico, he said, "if I stop drinking and stop partying, I can live on that."

Another draw is property. Almost half of Mexican immigrants over 50 own property in Mexico, according to a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center. The decision can come down simply to the nebulous yet powerful tug of nostalgia.

Family ties are perhaps the most powerful force. But they can pull either way: The probability of return is much higher for the 58 percent of immigrants over 50 who left spouses back in Mexico than for the 24 percent who have spouses in the United States, according to data from the Mexican Migration Project, a survey series run by researchers at Princeton University and the Universidad de Guadalajara in Mexico.

Sanchez stayed in the United States because she could not bear to leave her children and grandchildren.

"In the beginning, I really tried to convince my old man to return," she said. "But I got used to it. Now I've got to stay here because all my family is here."

Sebastian Castaneda, on the other hand, returned to Mexico to care for his mother, who is now 96.

"That's why I don't go back" to the United States, he said.

Francisco Franco Alvarez spent 30 years in California making bricks, working as a landscaper and tending Los Angeles' sewers. He left his wife, Silvina Barba Tejeda, behind at their home in Valle de Guadalupe, a small rural town in western Mexico. But he returned every winter on what his daughters Silvina and Maria Adela joke was the annual visit to conceive. There were 16 pregnancies, resulting in four miscarriages and 12 children.

But 22 years ago, at age 62, he decided it was time to return home.

"An old man alone is like an old dog all alone," he said.

The 10 surviving children were long gone from the nest: four in Mexico and six in the United States. He and his wife could live on $500 a month from Social Security, plus $381 from a union pension. They owned a house, partially built with money he sent back every month from his jobs in the United States.

Most undocumented immigrants in the United States have yet to reach the age in which it becomes all but impossible to lug another sack of cement across construction sites or race up and down a ladder picking peaches from a tree. When they do, their choices are likely to be different from those of the current crop of elderly.

For starters, unlike most old-timers today, they will probably remain undocumented. In the 1960s and 1970s, becoming a legal resident was relatively simple: Having a child in the United States was often all it took.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 allowed an additional 2.3 million undocumented immigrants from Mexico to become legal American residents, eligible for benefits like Social Security.

But the situation is no longer so easy. In the past 10 years, crossing the border has become much more difficult. These days, even if an undocumented immigrant were entitled to obtain legal residence the immigrant would be barred officially from the United States for 10 years.

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I wonder what all the socialized healthcare/"SS as a pension" nuts think about this.

Thank you for reading the article before commenting on it.

And as poor a job as we might do in preventing illegal immigration, it is far from an "open door policy".

so white people in texas can now get minority scholarships? kidding, kidding.

The Asia-American population in Hawaii was very surprising when I visited the islands, that along with the rampant racism from the local hawaiian population toward caucasians. That was an experience.

Accidentally skipped over/mis-read that part when I read the article. Or I would have not included those states it in my post.

I've never seen a Mexican.

What'd you say man?

I guess when their grandparents can tell them stories about the American overthrow of the soverign nation of Hawaii they have a pretty decent reason to bitch.

No way! Texas! Then again, I suppose they're all bible bashers down there, black or white

*Mexican

That simple eh? Nobody in Hawaii wanted THAT to happen...

Yeah that simple. But I guess anywhere the US wants to go is OK with you.

Everybody wants to join the USA!!!

If I remember my history correctly, and I don't know if we have any Hawaiians on the board to help us out with this, the Monarchy was overthrown by a group of Anglos led by pinapple magnate Sanford Dole in the 1890's. During the Spanish-American War, Hawaii was annexed to the US. So basically, it's about the same as Texas. A small white minority with money, guns, and the support of the US gov't overthrows the native government and establishes their own, and you consider this to be the people wanting to join the USA? OK.

The Hawaiian natives aren't considered Asian American, are they?

At any rate, if there are that many Asians over there, I'm thinking I might have a new place I'd like to live.