Future Imperfect

It’s always gratifying when you run across someone who, presumably, is better informed than you who corroborates what you’ve been saying for many years. That was the case with this op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by John J. Miller, the individual is sociologist Richard Alba, and the idea is the notion of a “majority minority” United States:

“The majority minority narrative is wrong,” says sociologist Richard Alba, referring to the idea that nonwhite Americans will outnumber whites by 2050 or so. In his recent book, “The Great Demographic Illusion,” Mr. Alba, 78, shows that many “nonwhites” are assimilating into an American mainstream, much as white ethnic groups did before them. Government statistics have failed to account for this complex reality, partly for political reasons, and in doing so they’ve encouraged sloppy thinking about the country’s future.

“The surge in mixing across ethno-racial lines is one of the most important and unheralded developments of our time,” says Mr. Alba, a professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He rattles off facts and figures: Today, more than 10% of U.S.-born babies have one parent who is nonwhite or Hispanic and one who is white and not Hispanic. That proportion is larger than the number of babies born to two Asian parents and not far behind the number of babies born to two black parents. “We’re entering a new era of mixed backgrounds,” Mr. Alba says.

Maybe the reason that I was skeptical of the notion as soon as I encountered it a couple of decades ago is that the mother of my closest blood relatives other than my siblings was Mexican. It was obvious to me that many “Hispanics”, a term I don’t much care for since it conflates a linguistic community with an ethnic community, consider themselves white and even more would do so in the years to come. I don’t see Mexican-Americans as “persons of color”. I see them as cousins and, sadly, to whatever extent they subscribe to the “persons of color” they will impede their own progress. Maybe it’s because when I was a kid the polite term was “colored people” and it meant blacks, cf. the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

I think that both political parties are miscalculating rather badly. Democrats, I presume, have visions of Mexican immigrants, Central American immigrants, South Asian immigrants, and East Asian immigrants being as solidly Democratic as African Americans have been for the last 90 years. If the progressive Democratic leadership really believes that party affiliation will overrule the generally socially quite conservative views that today’s immigrants hold, I think they’re misreading history.