In a rising number of U.S. counties, Hispanic and black Americans are the majority
Non-Hispanic white Americans account for 60% of the U.S. population, but in a growing number of counties, a majority of residents are Hispanic or black, reflecting the nation’s changing demographics and shifting migration patterns.
In 2018, there were 151 U.S. counties where Hispanics, blacks or two much smaller racial and ethnic groups – American Indians and Alaska Natives – made up a majority of the population, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data. That was an increase from 110 such counties in 2000. The 41 counties that joined the list between 2000 and 2018 are all majority Hispanic or majority black. (For a full list of these counties, see the sortable table at the end of the post.)
Overall, 69 counties were majority Hispanic in 2018, 72 were majority black and 10 were majority American Indian or Alaska Native. The majority American Indian or Alaska Native counties are unique in that most have experienced overall population declines since 2000, even as the share of American Indian or Alaska Native residents in these counties remained fairly flat.
There were no U.S. counties where Asians accounted for more than half of the population, but in Honolulu County, Hawaii, the population was 42% Asian and 9% Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander.
The South and Southwest of the United States hold most of the counties where Hispanic, black or indigenous people make up a majority of residents. These counties represent just 5% of the 3,142 counties in the U.S. and about half of the country’s 293 majority nonwhite counties (a figure that includes counties where multiple racial and ethnic groups combine to account for a majority).
About this analysis
Rapid growth in majority Hispanic counties
The number of majority Hispanic counties doubled between 2000 and 2018, from 34 to 69 – mostly in the South and West. In all but four of these 69 counties, the Hispanic share of the population grew during that period. The few counties that experienced declines saw only slight decreases, and no county that was majority Hispanic in 2000 fell below 50% Hispanic by 2018.
These trends are in line with the growth of the U.S. Hispanic population as a whole, which reached a new high in 2018 even as its rate of growth slowed. The Latino population grew at a faster rate than most other racial or ethnic groups during the 2000s, due to relatively high birth rates among Hispanic women and immigration from Latin America.
Related: See Pew Research Center’s U.S. population projections through 2065, which provide a look at immigration’s impact on population growth and on racial and ethnic change.
In 2018, Texas was home to the 10 counties in the U.S. with the largest shares of Hispanic residents. Starr County, home to about 65,000 people overall, had the largest concentration of Hispanic residents, at 96% of the population. Other counties where Hispanics accounted for an especially large share of residents included Webb (95%), Hidalgo (92%) and Cameron counties (90%) – all in Texas.
The Hispanic populations of some larger U.S. counties also grew between 2000 and 2018. San Bernardino County, California (population 2.2 million) was the most populous county to become majority Hispanic during this span. Osceola County, Florida (home to about 370,000) saw the largest percentage point increase in Hispanic residents during this time (26 points, rising from 29% to 55%).
The migrating U.S. black population
While the black share of the total U.S. population has not changed substantially over the last two decades, the number of majority black counties in the U.S. grew from 65 to 72 between 2000 and 2018. One contributing factor may be migration of black Americans from the North to the South and from cities into suburbs.
There are now 15 majority black counties that were not majority black in 2000. Among them, Rockdale County, Georgia, located about half an hour outside Atlanta, had the largest percentage point increase in the share of black residents (from 18% in 2000 to 55% in 2018). With about 930,000 residents, Shelby County, Tennessee, which contains Memphis, was the county with the largest population to become majority black.
The 10 counties with the highest shares of black residents in 2018 were in Mississippi (seven counties) Alabama (two) and Virginia (one). In these 10 counties, about 70% or more residents were black.
Meanwhile, eight counties that were majority black in 2000 are no longer. Three of these are large U.S. cities that the Census Bureau includes in its county estimates: Washington, D.C.; Richmond, Virginia; and St. Louis, Missouri. Washington (home to roughly 702,000 residents in 2018) saw a 19% increase in total population during that period, while its black population decreased by 9%. The city’s share of black residents declined by 15 percentage points, from 60% to 45%.
Majority American Indian or Alaska Native counties
In 2018, there were eight U.S. counties where more than half of the population was American Indian; two other counties were majority Alaska Native.
While majority Hispanic and black counties are growing in number, these predominantly American Indian or Alaska Native counties have experienced net population loss from 2000 to 2018. And one county that was majority American Indian or Alaska Native in 2000 is no longer: San Juan County, Utah, where the share of American Indian residents fell 8 percentage points, from 55% to 47%.
All 10 majority American Indian counties are located on or near reservation land in the Midwest and the West, and most have populations of fewer than 20,000 people. The exceptions are McKinley County, New Mexico, and Apache County, Arizona, both of which are home to about 72,000 people.
The two counties where the majority of residents were Alaska Native are both in rural Alaska: Bethel Census Area (population of roughly 18,000) and Nome Census Area (population of about 10,000).
Population in U.S. counties where Hispanic, black or indigenous people are a large share of residents
Note: This analysis includes only counties with 10,000 or more residents in 2018. These counties account for 77% of the nation’s 3,142 counties and 99% of the U.S. population.
Source: Pew Research Center analysis of 2000 decennial census and 2018 Census Bureau population estimates.
Katherine Schaeffer is a research assistant at Pew Research Center.
Census: Number of ‘majority Hispanic’ US counties doubles
by Paul Bedard
November 21, 2019
In the latest evidence of the effect Latin American
immigrants are having on the United States, the number of U.S. counties that
have turned majority Hispanic has doubled.
New Census Bureau data analyzed by the Pew Research Center
found that from 2000 to 2018, the number of majority Hispanic counties jumped
from 34 to 69.
What’s more, the overall number of U.S. counties that turned
majority minority-based, mostly Hispanic or African American, also surged to
151 from 110 in 2000. Most of those counties are in Southern California and
along the Mexico-U.S. border.
“Overall, 69 counties were majority Hispanic in 2018, 72 were
majority black and 10 were majority American Indian or Alaska Native. The
majority American Indian or Alaska Native counties are unique in that most have
experienced overall population declines since 2000, even as the share of
American Indian or Alaska Native residents in these counties remained fairly
flat,” said the Pew analysis.
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Other reports have shown that the share of immigrants, mostly
Hispanic, have continued to break records due to legal and illegal immigration
and the baby boom among new arrivals.
The majority black counties are also in the South, though
mostly from Louisiana and to the east.
“While the black share of the total U.S. population has not
changed substantially over the last two decades, the number of majority black
counties in the U.S. grew from 65 to 72 between 2000 and 2018. One contributing
factor may be migration of black Americans from the North to the South and from
cities into suburbs,” said Pew.
Census
Bureau: Immigration Driving Half of U.S. Population Growth
JOHN BINDER
Immigration to the United States is now driving
nearly half of all population growth in the country instead of increased birth
rates, the U.S. Census Bureau finds.
The latest Census Bureau estimates on the U.S.
population reveal that about 48.5 percent of all population growth is driven by
the country’s mass illegal and legal immigration policy, where more than 1.5
million foreign nationals are admitted to the country every year.
(Axios)
Axios analysis by Stef
Knight details the
growing share to which immigration is increasingly driving population growth
across the U.S. Since 2011, for example, the level to which immigration has
accounted for overall population growth has increased more than 13 percent.
According to
the Wall Street Journal analysis,
about nine percent of U.S. counties are growing solely because of immigration.
This concludes that about nine percent of counties have regional birth rates
that do not exceed the annual number of deaths in the area.
Similarly,
the Wall Street Journal notes,
more than half of all population growth in states like Florida, Ohio, Virginia,
Kansas, and Michigan, among others, is because of immigration.
Though
pundits have claimed that the country’s admittance of 1.2 million legal
immigrants a year is necessary to increase birth rates, researchers have found
that the growth of the immigrant population has little impact on birth rates.
Center for
Immigration Studies Director of Research Steven Camarota discovered in his latest study this year that
“immigrant fertility has only a small impact on the nation’s overall birth
rate,” citing that immigrants in the U.S. raise the nation’s birth rate for all
women by two births per 1,000 women.
“Immigration
has a minor impact because the difference between immigrant and native
fertility is too small to significantly change the nation’s overall birth
rate,” Camarota noted in the study.
At current
legal immigration levels, the U.S. population is set to hit an unprecedented 404 million residents by 2060 — including
a foreign-born population of 69 million.
The U.S.
does not have to rapidly increase its total resident population and
foreign-born population, as legal immigration moratoriums have been implemented in the past to give time for new
arrivals to properly assimilate to American life. Halting all immigration to
the country would stabilize the population to a comfortable 329 million
residents in the next four decades.
Share
of counties where whites are a minority has doubled since 1980
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/01/share-of-counties-where-whites-are-a-minority-has-doubled-since-1980/
BY
Last week’s
Census Bureau release of
2014 population estimates confirms that the U.S. is becoming ever more diverse,
at the local level as well as nationally. As of last summer, according to a
Fact Tank analysis, 364 counties, independent cities and other county-level
equivalents (11.6% of the total) did not have non-Hispanic white majorities –
the most in modern history, and more than twice the level in 1980.
That year – the first decennial enumeration in which the nation’s
Hispanic population was comprehensively counted – non-Hispanic whites were
majorities in all but 171 out of 3,141 counties (5.4%), according to our
analysis. The 1990 census was the first to break out non-Hispanic whites as a
separate category; that year, they made up the majority in all but 186
counties, or 5.9% of the total. (The Census Bureau considers Hispanic to be an
ethnicity rather than a race; accordingly, Hispanics can be of any race.)
Another telling indicator of greater diversity: In 1990, there were
only 29 counties where no single racial or ethnic group made up a majority of
the population. Last year, 151 counties had no racial or ethnic majority.
While the single biggest Hispanic-majority county is in Florida
(Miami-Dade, 66% of whose 2.7 million people are Hispanic), most are
concentrated in the Southwest: 60 are in Texas, 12 are in New Mexico and 11 are
in California. All but two of the 93 black-majority counties are in states of
the old Confederacy (with 25 in Mississippi, 17 in Georgia and 11 in Alabama).
In 26 counties, Native Americans or Alaska Natives (who are combined into one
group for census purposes) comprise the majority; aside from eight lightly
populated boroughs and census areas in Alaska, most of the other counties
overlap with reservations in the Southwest and Great Plains.
All in all, non-Hispanic whites are less than a majority in four
states – California, Texas, New Mexico and Hawaii – as well as the District of
Columbia. In fact, in none of those places does a single racial or ethnic group
have a majority: California has almost equal shares of Hispanics (38.6%) and
non-Hispanic whites (38.5%); non-Hispanic whites are the plurality in Texas
(43.5%); Hispanics in New Mexico (47.7%); blacks in D.C. (47.4%); and Asians in
Hawaii (36.4%).
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