Vladimir KOTLYAR – Independent analyst and researcher

The breakneck US demographic dynamics and its potential global impact have been the subjects of intense debates over the past couple of decades.As can be understood from the US Census Bureau estimates (1), the share of White Europeans' descendants in the US dropped from 83.4% in 1970 to 65% in 2010 and will further shrink to 46%-48% by 2050 (2). In contrast, the population growth tends to be extremely fast among the US Hispanic community, with the African-American population trailing. By 2050, the number of non-Europeans in the US is expected to reach a total of 200 million, 25% of them – Hispanic, 16% – African American, and 10%  – of Asia Pacific origin. In California, for example, only 40.1% of the residents were of European descent in 2010. At the moment Europeans do remain the majority in New York with 57%, but their part in the wider metropolitan area has decreased from 54.3% to 49.6% over the past decade… 

There is expert consensus, backed, for example, by a recent Brookings Institution report (3), that the contraction of the share of Europeans' descendants in the overall US ethnic balance is going to be a long-playing tendency. In fact, the only remaining question in the context is whether they will become the minority in the US by 2050 or considerably sooner.

The shift is explained by the European population's aging and low fertility rates against the background of vigorous demographic dynamics of the Hispanic and Asia Pacific communities – 0.2% and still evanescent among Europeans vs. 3.2% and 2.7% among the latter two groups. In 2008, 47% of children under 5, plus 44% of people under 18 in the US were Hispanics, Asians, or African Americans, with the Hispanic young people accounting for roughly a half of the figure. As a result, in 2000-2009 the Hispanic and European populations in the US grew by 8.2 and 2.4 million respectively, while the inflow of Hispanic and European immigrants was 4.8 and 1.3 million, so that the cumulative growth across the two groups measured 13.1 and 4.3 million (4).

French watchers contributed interesting comments on the social aspect of the situation (5). Traditionally, “European” in the US used to be a bracket term for White Anglo-Saxon protestants from Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland. Those as the politically and socioeconomically dominant group used to define the US identity and culture, keeping the country within a modified European framework. Today's US is rapidly evolving into a post-European, ethically composite country with a mosaic culture as its non-European population groups neither fit nor want to be drawn into the US melting pot, do not assimilate, and tend to exist as fairly insulated communities.

The mass non-European, particularly Hispanic immigration evokes serious concerns in the right-wing part of the US establishment, and the idea of resistance to it is gaining support both in the US Congress and on the grass-roots level. Control at the US-Mexican border across which much of the immigration tide is spilling into the US is exercised with the US army assistance, and the number of illegal immigrants deported in 2010 alone was reported at the striking level of 400,000. The US society, in the meantime, is increasingly leaning towards opposition to offering non-European descent immigrants full-scale citizenships. S. Huntington, the renown and controversial author of The Clash of Civilizations, slammed the US Administration's policies of multiculturalism and immigration encouragement in a 2004 paper titled The Hispanic Challenge3, where he attributed it to the “U.S. intellectual, business, and political elites of  cosmopolitan and transnational identities ”and projected as the imminent results “the rise of group identities based on race, ethnicity, and gender over national identity” and “the expanding number of immigrants with dual  nationalities and dual loyalties” (6).

In today's US, nostalgia for the WASP-dominated era of cultural uniformity is a widespread phenomenon. The impressive success of the Tea Party filling in the niche of the neoconservative political vanguard attests to its importance in the overall US picture which the advent of the first black US President to the White House should nor blur.

Occasionally, resistance to non-European immigration in the US takes bizarre forms, as when US business magnate D. Trump called into question the legitimacy of B. Obama's US citizenship in the wake of the 2008 elections, or even turns violent. On top of random attacks against immigrants, the violence sometimes targets government institutions, which was the case in Oklahoma in 1995 and when federal agencies received mail with explosives or dangerous bacteria in the 2000ies.  

It has to be taken into account that the drift in the US population balance will sooner or later translate into a transformation of the US foreign policy. The commonplace view is that Washington's attention will be increasingly drawn by Latin America, Asia, and Africa, largely at the expense of Europe (7). True, regions outside of Europe occupy an unprecedented amount of space on B. Obama's foreign policy agenda, but forecasts that Europe is bound to recede from the spotlight should be looked upon with caution. The strengthening in every regard of China, other Asia Pacific countries, and Latin America's champions, along with Russia's international comeback, make it unlikely that the US will be able to maintain the grip on global developments without constant European and NATO assistance.

The trends in the US domestic demography and the massive non-European population inflow to the country will continue, prompting further opposition to multiculturalism which will also increasingly factor into the US foreign policy. A pertinent question is: will the US bipartisan political system be able to integrate the emerging non-European majority into its electoral base or will the dynamics propel to power a third party, whose strategy in international politics will likely deviate from the US XX century patterns?

USpolls indicate that the majority currently in the making is discontent with being grossly underrepresented in the US Administration.  At the moment Hispanics account for just 4% of the US senior executive service. The share is projected to reach 6.8% and 9.5%-12.5% by 2030 ad 2050, the time when, accordingly, 23% and 30% of the US employed population will be Hispanic (8).

It is also worth noting that recent European developments – the August, 2011 outbreaks of immigrant unrest in Great Britain and brewing opposition to multiculturalism manifest in the July 22, 2011 twin terrorist attack in Oslo – couple to the context of the US demographic revolution.

1. U.S.Census Bureau, Cumulated Estimates of the Components of Resident Population Change by Race and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1,2000 to July 1,2009 (NC-EST2009-05), June 2010 /http://www.census.gov.

2. Jim Cohen, Phillip S.Golub. Etats Unis, vers une societe post-europeenne/Le Monde diplomatique. 5 juillet 2011.

3. Sabrina Tavernise. U.S. looking more Hispanic and Asian, and less white/The International Herald Tribune, 1.9.2011.

4. Table 5. Components of Population Change by Race and Hispanic Origin. U.S.Census Bureau, Cumulated Estimates of the Components of Resident Population Change by Race and Hispanic Origin for the United States: April 1,2000 to July 1,2009 (NC-EST2009-05), June 2010 /http://www.census.gov.

5. For details, see: Jean-Francois Boyer. “Etats-Unis, version “Latinos” / http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/ 2005/12/ BOYER/13000. Le Monde diplomatique, decembre 2005.

6. Samuel Huntington. “The Hispanic Challenge”, Foreign Policy, March-April 2004.

7. See Ref. 2

8. Joe Davidson. Report: Latinos in SES will be “vastly underrepresented” by 2030/The Washington Post, 22.9.2011.