There are some unmistakable trends in the latest Pew Research Center Study, which analyzes U.S. Census Bureau data.
– Asian-American population is now the fastest growing segment of the U.S., overtaking the growth rate of U.S. Latinos.
– U.S. Hispanic population slowed, growing annually on average by only 2.8 percent between 2007 and 2014. In the years between 2000 and 20007, the rate was 4.4 percent.
– The Asian/American population has been growing at a steady 3.4 percent between 2007 and 2014.
– The growth rate of Asian/Americans was driven by increased immigration from Asian countries, especially from South Asia and China.
Pew had some conclusions about why this shift is happening. First is immigration: The Immigration rate from Latin America has slowed substantially compared to the highpoint of Latino immigration in the 1980s and 1990s (though you wouldn’t know that from the heated anti-immigrant political rhetoric). In fact immigration from Mexico has now reversed: there are now more people moving to Mexico from the U.S. than coming north.
Right now main driver of Latino population growth is U.S. births. But even there, a change is afoot. Throughout much of the early 2000s birth rates of Hispanic women ages 15 to 44 were about 95 births per 1,000 women, reaching a peak of 98.3 in 2006. However, since the onset of the Great Recession, their birth rates have declined, steadily falling to 72.1 births per 1,000 Latino/American women ages 15 to 44 in 2014.
Unlike Hispanic population growth, the growth of Asian-Americans is still driven by immigration. Since 2000, more immigrants were coming from Asia than from Latin America.
According to the U.S. Census, the Asian/American proportion of the total U.S. population is is around 6 percent. The largest ethnic groups represented in the census were Chinese (3.79 million), Filipino (3.41 million), Indian (3.18 million), Vietnamese (1.73 million), Korean (1.7 million), and Japanese (1.3 million).