The number of non-white Americans exceeded 100 million for the first time in 2006, according to a just released Census Bureau report.

According to the latest figures, non-Hispanic whites accounted for 66.4 percent of U.S. population on July 1, 2006. Minorities were 33.6 percent of the total. As recently as 1990,  76 percent of Americans called themselves non-Hispanic white. In 1965, the American population was 88 percent white. 

This shift is essentially all caused by public policy—specifically, the Immigration Act of 1965 and the simultaneous collapse of law enforcement against illegal immigration. As a result, the U.S. demographic balance has been completely destabilized.

Less reported, the recent data showed a growing generational racial divide between the young and older persons living in the U.S. [New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges By Sam Roberts, New York Times,May 17, 2007]

In 2006 white, non-Hispanics accounted for:

• 56 percent of persons 9 and younger

• 60 percent of persons 10 to 19

• 67 percent of persons 20 to 64

• 81 percent of persons 65 and older

From July 1, 2005 to July 1, 2006, the white population grew by a miniscule 0.26 percent. The minority population grew by 2.42 percent.

• If the white and minority populations continue growing at their respective 2005-06 growth rates, present day minorities will attain majority status by the year 2038. (Table 1.) (This is much earlier than the Census Bureau projects, primarily because they  presume a reduction in legal immigration.)

And this extrapolation does not capture the dramatic situation into which Washington has led the white population.

A basic measure of fertility is the hypothetical number of births a woman would have over her childbearing years if she experienced the age-specific birthrates for her group. Based on 2004 fertility rates  (the latest available), non-Hispanic white women will have 1.847 children; non-Hispanic Black women, 2.02 children; and Hispanic women, 2.82 children.[PDF]

The "replacement" rate—2.1 births per women—is considered the value at which a group can exactly replace itself over the course of a generation. Fertility rates of non-Hispanic whites were 12 percent below the replacement rate in 2004. They are expected to remain low in future decades. This will eventually shrink the white population. 

Births to white, non-Hispanic women have already started to fall in absolute terms. (Table 2)  White, non-Hispanic mothers gave birth to 2,244,288 children in 2006. That was about 28,000 fewer births than in 2005, a decline of 1.25 percent.

Over the same period births to minority mothers rose by 2.78 percent.

In 2006 45.9 percent of live births were to minority mothers. That was up from 45.0 percent in 2005.

Here's the next big headline (you read it on VDARE.COM first):

• If white births continue shrinking and minority births growing at the present rate, minorities will account for more than half of all births by 2011.

By 2021 more than 60 percent of births will be to minorities (Table 2.)

Of course, if immigration were completely cut off now, the date at which minorities would become the U.S. majority would be greatly postponed—probably into the 22nd century.

And, if immigrant stock birthrates began to decline to the American norm, as they arguably will, it might never happen at all.

But right now, the U.S. federal government is literally doing what the poet Bertolt Brecht suggested only satirically that the East German communist government should do.

It is dissolving the people and electing new one.

Edwin S. Rubenstein (email him) is President of ESR Research Economic Consultants in Indianapolis.