More white people died in the United States last year than were born, a surprising slump coming more than a decade before the Census Bureau says that the ranks of white Americans will likely drop with every passing year.
Population estimates for 2012 released Thursday show what’s known as a natural decrease — a straightforward calculation of births minus deaths — of about 12,400 people among the nation’s 198 million non-Hispanic whites.
Although the percentage is small, several demographers said they are not aware of another time in U.S. history — not even during the Depression or wars — when there was such shrinkage among the dominant racial group. No other group showed a similar falloff.
The decrease was offset by 188,000 white immigrants, most from Canada and Germany but also from Russia and Saudi Arabia. And non-Hispanic whites remain the single largest group, making up 63 percent of the country.
But demographers were surprised by the outsize drop in births compared with deaths, which the Census Bureau projects will begin happening with regularity by 2025.
“Once this recession has waned, we’re probably going to see at least a temporary uptick in births until death rates start to rise,” he said.
The decline in the non-Hispanic white population has happened more quickly than demographers with the Census Bureau have been predicting. That’s because births and immigration levels, which can counter the drop, have slowed more than expected in recent years, said Jennifer Ortman, a Census Bureau demographer in the bureau’s population projections division.
Census demographers expect the growth rate for non-Hispanic whites to resume rising — slowly — when the economy improves. The number for whites should peak in 2024, when the oldest baby boomers, who are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic whites, are well into their 70s and dying in larger numbers.
The decrease for whites has little significance in the short term, said Dowell Myers, a demographer and urban planner who teaches at the University of Southern California.
“In California, we roll our eyes at this,” he said. “Whites have been a minority here since 1999. But whites are still a majority of voters. Babies don’t vote. Older people vote. So it doesn’t have any direct functional meaning.”
But Frey said the natural decrease in whites suggests that aging whites will increasingly come to rely on the younger, mainly minority population to underwrite social programs that will sustain them. “Last year, we saw the majority of babies are minorities,” he said. “Now we see more whites are dying than being born. Together, that tells us a lot about where we’re going as a country.”
White Preparation For The Inevitable Demographic Shift.
It's ALL About Race
