The Census Bureau’s projections, released today, estimate that minorities will be the majority by 2042, nearly a decade earlier than previously projected. Expect much hand-wringing from some quarters, and, of course, calls for limiting immigration. There are plenty of re-incarnated Madison Grants out there predicting doom and gloom for America’s posterity.

But Grant, the Yale-educated eugenicist whose book The Passing of the Great Race was published in 1916, turned out to be spectacularly wrong. He warned: “The result of unlimited immigration is showing plainly in the rapid decline in the birth rate of native Americans because the poorer classes of colonial stock, where they still exist, will not bring children into the world to compete in the labor market with the Slovak, the Italian, the Syrian, and the Jew.”I suppose Grant would be pleased to know that “Nordic” peoples haven’t disappeared in the United States. The largest ethnic group in America in the last Census was German, followed by Irish, English, African American, and plain old American. But, of course, his predictions that southern and eastern European immigrants would despoil America turned out to be spectacularly wrong. The progeny of those immigrants not only successfully integrated into the social and economic mainstream, but have become among the most successful Americans as measured by education and earnings. And the cultural contributions of Jews, Italians, Greeks, Poles, and others have enriched the American Melting Pot immeasurably.

Part of the problem with projections like the one issued today is that it does not adequately take account of the effect of intermarriage. Officially, Hispanics-now at 15 percent of the population but predicted to rise to 30 percent by 2050-include not only individuals like me but my children and grandchildren. My father’s ancestors came from Spain to New Mexico in 1601; my mother’s came from England sometime before 1800 and from Ireland in the mid 19th Century. I married a Jew whose ancestors came from Russia and Poland in the 19th and early 20th Centuries. One of our sons married a woman whose ancestry is probably Scots Irish (they came so long ago, no one in the family knows or cares where from); another married a woman whose mother was born in Ecuador and whose father came from Cuba. But the government is happy to count all eight of our grandchildren in the Hispanic column.

A little less obsession over race and ethnicity would be good not only for the Left but the Right as well.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 3:50 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.