By Russell Clemings
The Fresno Bee  www.fresnobee.com

It will take until the middle of this century for the nation's population to catch up with demographic changes that have already taken place in California, a new Census Bureau report says.

By 2050, the nation's Hispanic and Asian populations are expected to triple in size, whereas numbers of non-Hispanic whites, who made up more than two-thirds of the U.S. population in the 2000 census, are predicted to grow only slightly.

As a result, non-Hispanic whites will make up only about half of the nation's total population of 420 million in 2050, if the Census Bureau projections are accurate.

When that happens, the U.S. population will be on the verge of a milestone that California has already passed, said Mary Heim, chief of the demographic research unit in the state's Department of Finance.

The year "2000 was when white non-Hispanics were no longer a majority in California," Heim said.
The new projections suggest that growth of the non-Hispanic white population will slow steadily from 2.8% in the current decade to 0.6% in the 2030s.

One decade after that, with the size of the postwar "baby boom" population steadily dropping, numbers of non-Hispanic whites are actually expected to decline slightly.

Overall, the Census Bureau says, the nation's population may then be growing at a rate slower than at any time since the Great Depression. But populations of other racial and ethnic groups will continue to rise.

From 2000 to 2050, the total U.S. population is expected to rise by 49%, from 282 million to 420 million, but numbers of non-Hispanic whites will increase by less than 8% in that time. In contrast, the Hispanic population is expected to grow by 188%, the Asian population by 213% and the African-American population by 71% in the same period.

As the nation grows ever more diverse, it will at least be able to watch and learn from how California deals with language issues and other outcomes related to the increases in Hispanic and Asian populations.

"This is old news to anyone in California," said Hans Johnson, demographer for the Public Policy Institute of California, a nonprofit research center.

"If these projections turn out to be true," Johnson said, then "the nation in 50 years will look somewhat like California does today. California is on the cutting edge of many trends, and we're certainly on the cutting edge of demographic trends in the United States."

In the 2000 census, California was 47% non-Hispanic white, 32% Hispanic and 11% Asian. Most of the central San Joaquin Valley had even higher Hispanic percentages -- about 44% in Fresno, Kings and Madera counties, 45% in Merced County, and an outright majority of 51% in Tulare County.

Heim said her unit is working on similar projections of future racial and ethnic populations for California and its counties but is not yet ready to publish them. All evidence suggests, however, that the state's population diversity has continued to rise.

"I believe the trend is continuing," she said.
When state demographers last made such projections, in late 1998, they concluded that California's Hispanic population would comprise 48% of a total 2040 population of almost 59 million. Asians, they predicted, would account for anadditional 15%.

Fresno County's projected 2040 population of 1.5 million would be 52% Hispanic and 15% Asian, and Tulare County's total of slightly more than 800,000 would be 65% Hispanic and 7% Asian under the 1998 estimates.