Hispanics fueling U.S. growth

Roughly one in three Americans is a minority, according to a new Census report that shows Hispanics continue to fuel much of the nation's population growth.

The nation's minority population totaled an estimated 98 million in 2005, or 33 percent of the nation's total of 296.4 million, according to new national estimates released Tuesday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The bureau will release state numbers later this year, said Robert Spendlove, manager of demographic and economic analysis for the Governor's Office of Planning and Budget in Utah.

The national estimates are consistent with what Spendlove said would be expected for Utah, where the Hispanic population grew by 200 percent from 1990 to 2004. However, Spendlove said Utah's minority population is likely closer to one-in-five minority than the nation's one-in-three.

"It is something Utah will have to be considering as the state goes forward," Spendlove said. "There are struggles and opportunities related to the diversification of the state's population."

He pointed to closing the educational achievement gap as a key challenge the state will face, but added that diversity "creates a great educational opportunity in terms of understanding other cultures."

Nationally, with an estimated population of 42.7 million, Hispanics continue to be the largest minority group, and the fastest-growing. Hispanics accounted for nearly half of the nation's population growth of 2.8 million between July 1, 2004, and July 1, 2005.

"These mid-decade numbers provide further evidence of the increasing diversity of our nation's population," said Census Bureau director Louis Kincannon.

The second largest minority group is blacks, with a population of 39.7 million, followed by 14.4 million Asians, 4.5 million American Indians and Alaska natives, and 990,000 native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. The population of non-Hispanic whites who indicated no other race totaled 198.4 million in 2005.

About 38 percent of the nation's population growth was due to immigration, said University of Utah senior research economist Pam Perlich. And, as the population 65 and older reached 36.8 million, minorities had younger median ages than non-Hispanic whites.

That, coupled with numbers that show a greater proportion of minorities in 2005 than was projected in 2004, suggest that a white minority may happen before the Census Bureau's projection of 2050, Perlich said.

"The white, non-Hispanic share should be 67.2 percent, but it is estimated to have fallen to 66.9 percent," Perlich said. "This should mean that we hit majority-minority faster than expected."