A Few Thoughts On What The Census Bureau’s Projected White Minority Will Mean For America By Steve Sailer

Now They Tell Us! A Few Thoughts On What The Census Bureau’s Projected White Minority Will Mean For America

By Steve Sailer

Typically, the two most important factors influencing the long-term success of an organization are the quantity and quality of people involved.

This is particularly true for a country. Yet there has been barely any discussion in the U.S. prestige press on the implications of the demographic change imposed by immigration. We’re constantly lectured by the New York Times on the long-run impact of carbon emissions and by the Wall Street Journal on the difficulties posed for Social Security by the changing ratio of workers to retirees over the next several decades. But the basic factor driving these issues is almost off-limits.

That’s why there is a VDARE.com.

In forecasting the U.S. population, the wild card is always the Hispanic component.

For example, on January 13, 2000, the U.S. Census Bureau released population projections stating that the number of Hispanics resident in the country would grow massively, from 32 million in 2000 to 98 million in 2050.

When the Bureau conducted the decennial census on April 1, 2000, however, it found out that there were already over 35 million Hispanics within the borders—ten percent more than the government had previously imagined.

So in late 2001, the Census Bureau released “interim” projections incorporating the 2000 Census findings and projected that the number of Hispanics would hit 103 million in 2050.

Now, the Bureau has released its first full-blown set of projections in 8.5 years,. And they’re a doozy. The key figure: 133 million Hispanics by 2050, an increase of almost 100 million in half a century.

Is adding 100 million Latinos to the U.S. population a good idea? Will it “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity“?

(That’s the first sentence of something called the “U.S. Constitution”—a once-celebrated document put together way back when by a bunch of long-dead white guys, some of whom were slave-owners.)

We the people are supposed to have a say in such things. But how can we have a say when we’re not supposed to talk about it?

The well-worn responses of Establishment figures to public unease about adding 100 million Hispanics usually start with the words “All we have to do is …”

All we have to do is fix education. Once we just figure out how to get Hispanics and blacks to stay in school and learn as much as whites, we’re all set!

All we have to do is create more good jobs.

All we have to do is solve the illegitimacy crisis and get the Hispanic out-of-wedlock birthrate back down below 50 percent.

All we have to do is solve the housing / health care finance / carbon emission, energy / infrastructure / and crime crises!

In reality, we don’t know how to solve any of these problems. And we are unlikely to discover and implement workable solutions any time soon. I’ve been following social science and public policy for 36 years now. I’ve learned that fixes for social problems are rare.

In recent decades, we did finally make some progress against crime. But we did it through the brute force method of throwing a couple of million people in prison.

And there has been little change in the racial disparities in crime rates. Racial and ethnic differences of all kinds have been strikingly stable since the 1970s. In particular, the word that best sums up Latino America is inertia. Things just sort of keep on keeping on in the general direction that they were already moving.

What we do know is that all of these troubles are exacerbated by the mass immigration of people with low human capital.

And alleviating some of that immigration-caused pressure is something we actually do have a rough idea of how to carry out.

But you won’t hear that from John McCain, Barack Obama, or the mainstream media. Why not?

One reason is that there are huge constituencies out there who make their livings out of social problems. They won’t make the problems go away, of course, because that would make their jobs go away too. Instead, more immigration by more people lacking in human capital is their full employment plan.

Yet the quantity and quality of the American population does matter in the long run. It’s not even that hard to do the calculations of the opportunity cost.

Consider high school dropout rates. In 2007, Nobel Prize-winning economist James Heckman calculated [PDF]that the high school dropout rate in the U.S. had bottomed out at around 20 percent in 1969, but rose to about 25 percent by 2000. Over that period, there was no change in the dropout rate’s racial ratio: blacks and Hispanics raised in the U.S. were twice as likely as whites to drop out (and Hispanic youths raised in Mexico were much more likely).

I estimated that the majority of that increase was directly due to simple demographic change—high dropout-rate ethnic groups just made up a larger fraction of all 18-year-olds in 2000 than in 1969.

The rest of the worsening may have been an indirect product of demographic change as well. More non-Asian minorities (NAMs) mean more stressed schools and more anti-education attitudes in the classroom swamping traditional American values even for the kids of traditional Americans.

Simple math suggests that, all else being equal, the ethnic change projected by the Census Bureau is likely to raise the dropout rate from 25 percent to close to 30 percent.

Why do we want that?

Similarly, the change in ethnic makeup of 15-44 year olds will, just by itself, raise the illegitimacy rate by 4 points.

You can do similar calculations for rates of crime, lack of health insurance, unaffordable housing, and other social distresses. Most problems are inevitably made worse by the immigration-driven shift in America’s demographic balance—they have what Peter Brimelow in Alien Nation back in 1995 called “an immigration dimension“.

Similarly, the burden imposed by affirmative action on individual whites will rapidly increase as the racial ratio of minority quota beneficiaries to majority benefactors shifts. And, note carefully, the Census Bureau forecasts that minorities are forecast to be a majority in the U.S. by 2042, only 34 years from now.

Overall, at the very least, we’ll have to get used to being a country of lower average levels of achievement. For whatever reasons, Mexican culture and human accomplishment don’t go together.

For example, Hispanics today make up 23.4 percent of all Americans between 15 and 44, yet they only account for four percent of the U.S. Olympic team in Beijing. (Heck, only two of the 23 players on the 2006 U.S. World Cup soccer team had Spanish surnames.)

The Latino Olympic shortfall is particularly notable because Californians are three times more likely to make the Olympic team than non-Californians. The Golden State has always been fitness and outdoors mad. And the California culture encourages obsessions with eccentric minor sports, which is why Los Angeles was such a successful host for the 1932 and 1984 Olympics. And yet, over the last century, the now-13 million Hispanics in California have not assimilated much of the state’s local culture.

Even Dara Torres, the swimmer from Southern California who won three silver medals at a Barry Bonds-like age 41, turns out not to be as Hispanic as her surname implies—her father is Sephardic and she grew up in Beverly Hills.

The same pattern is seen internationally. As of Saturday night, the U.S. Olympic team had won 62 medals, while the Mexican team had won just a single bronze.

Moreover, if current policy continues, we’ll be a poorer and more unequal citizenry than we would have to be without so much immigration from south of the border. The Pew Hispanic Center reported in 2004:

“According to the study, the median net worth of Hispanic households in 2002 was $7,932. This was only nine percent of $88,651, the median wealth of non-Hispanic White households at the same time. … Twenty-six percent of Hispanic, 32 percent of non-Hispanic Black and 13 percent of non-Hispanic White households had zero or negative net worth in 2002. These proportions are essentially unchanged since 1996. …

“The wealthiest 25 percent of Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black households own 93 percent of the total wealth of each group. Among non-Hispanic White households, the top 25 percent own 79 percent of total wealth.”

And, in 2050, the future will look even more depressing. The Census Bureau says:

“In 2050, the nation’s population of children is expected to be 62 percent minority, up from 44 percent today. Thirty-nine percent are projected to be Hispanic (up from 22 percent in 2008), and 38 percent are projected to be single-race, non-Hispanic white (down from 56 percent in 2008).”

And then there are the problems exacerbated just by absolute changes in the quantity of residents of the country. A completely obvious trap is the one that liberals these days claim to be most concerned about: America’s carbon footprint. Clearly, importing tens of millions of poor Mexicans boosts this country’s—and the world’s—output of greenhouse gases because they’ll burn more fossil fuels living in America than in Mexico. Indeed, the possibility of affording a personal car is often the motivation for immigrating.

But what’s relevant for global warming is not just the difference in fuel consumption per person caused by immigration. Illegal aliens also have more children living in America than they would have if they had to stay home in Mexico.

According to the Public Policy Institute of California, immigrant Latinas in California in 2005 were having babies at the rate of 3.7 per lifetime, compared to only 2.4 for Mexican women back home in Mexico.

Unmistakable conclusion: Mexicans are sneaking into America to have more children than could afford to have in their own country.

You are almost never told that.

When you look under the hood of the Census Bureau projections, it’s apparent that the Hispanic population could turn out to be quite a bit bigger than 133 million by 2050. The Bureau assumes that the Hispanic total fertility rate (TFR) will decline from 2.70 in 2010 to 2.29 by 2050. In the real world, however, the trend has been going in the opposite direction: 1996, Latino women were having babies at a rate equivalent to 2.77 per lifetime. By 2006, the last year for which we have data, Latinos were up to 2.96.

On the other hand, there is a bit of good news in these new projections. The old projections badly underestimated the current level of immigration. Thus, the 2000 forecasters presumed that net immigration from the whole world would top out at 1.1 million per year in 2050.

In contrast, the 2008 projections assume that net international migration will accelerate from 1.3 million in 2010 to over 2.0 million in 2050.

But of course, the level of immigration is not an act of God. It’s a political decision—one that United States citizens have the right to change.

And they certainly would—if they were allowed to talk about it.

Hispanic Boot Hasn’t Dropped – Yet

By Steve Sailer

To celebrate its 25 anniversary, American Demographics magazine asked various marketing research gurus to list both their accurate predictions (yawn) and their biggest mistakes (interesting).

Youth culture trend spotter Irma Zandl offered the most intriguing bad prediction – not because she alone messed up, but because she had the guts to admit a mistake that has been made repeatedly since.

“Things That Have Not Happened—1988: The Hispanic influence

”We felt that this country would become more Latinized. However, with the exception of food and beverages and an occasional musician (e.g. Ricky Martin or J-Lo), we have not seen the kind of widespread influence that we anticipated. For example, there are still no mass fashion trends, no mass entertainment trends, no mass social trends rooted in the Hispanic culture.”

I certainly don’t blame Zandl for her fallacious forecast. I assumed exactly the same thing in 1988. The signs were pointing toward middle class American culture becoming more Latin.

That year Time Magazine put an East L.A. mural of the formidable Mexican-American actor Edward James Olmos on the cover over the headline: “¡Magnifico! Hispanic culture breaks out of the barrio.” As the laconic Lt. Castillo, Olmos had provided the moral center of gravity for that ultimate 1980s TV series, Miami Vice. And Olmos earned an Oscar nomination in 1988 for his portrayal of the inspiring calculus teacher Jaime A. Escalante in Stand and Deliver.

Back then, Corona was the coolest beer and East L.A.’s Los Lobos was the most talented rock band.

The year before their sensational cover version of “La Bamba” supercharged the hit biopic about Mexican-American musical prodigy Ritchie Valens.

Southern California architects had finally returned to building in the white stucco and red tile roof Spanish Mission style that suited the climate so well.

With the constant influx of new Latino immigrants, I thought, how could this trend not snowball?

Fifteen years have gone by. Hispanics have (supposedly) surpassed African-Americans to become the largest minority. But their impact on American culture lags far behind blacks – and even behind the much less numerous East Asians.

This weekend’s Movie of the Century, The Matrix Reloaded, for example, is full of black actors and stunts inspired by Hong Kong action movies and Japanese anime cartoons, but there’s nothing Latin American about it.

Of the approximately 270 movies to make $100 million at the domestic box office, only “Spy Kids” had a primarily Latino cast.

In 1999, Time made Puerto Rican singer Ricky Martin its cover boy over the headline “Latin Music Goes Pop!” But Pop! turned out to be a better description of poor Ricky’s career.

Even here in L.A., I’m repeatedly struck by how little impact Hispanic culture has on the tastemakers. Consider architecture. The lovely and time-honored Mission style has gone out of fashion again. What’s hot now, as embodied in the Walt Disney Concert Hall downtown, is Frank Gehry’s Mangled UFO Wreckage Look. The abrasive new Roman Catholic Cathedral, of all buildings, rejects populist Latin American styles for an intellectualized European deconstructionist look.

What happened? Why have all the pundits been wrong- going back to Zandl and me in 1988?

• First, the sheer mass of Spanish-speaking immigrants had an unexpected effect. Paradoxically, instead of increasing the cultural impact of Hispanics, it diminished the interpenetration of Latinos and non-Latinos by making possible the formation of gigantic Hispanic super-enclaves like northern Orange County The hundreds of thousands of Latinos there simply don’t need to have much interaction with the rest of America.As Ed Rubenstein documented in VDARE.com on recently, the number of residents of America who admitted to the Census that they speak English less than “very well” shot up from 14.0 million in 1990 to 21.3 million in 2000. Even among the native-born, those who don’t speak English very well grew from 4.0 million to 5.6 million.In turn, these demographic trends fertilized the Spanish language media, such as the Univision and Telemundo TV networks. These allow immigrants and their children to cocoon themselves in a Spanish alternate universe. (Not surprisingly, Univision and its Italian-American owner Jerrold Perenchio were the biggest financial backers of the campaign against Ron Unz’s 1998 anti-bilingual education Proposition 227.)

• Second, Hispanic immigrants, particularly the illegals, tend to lag in education and cultural sophistication. According to the Census Bureau, 65% of Mexican-born newcomers did not finish high school. Amazingly, while California is home to two million people with graduate degrees, it also hosts 2.2 million adults who have never even seen the inside of a high school. They are heavily Spanish-speaking.

Exacerbating the problem, Spanish-language television panders to the lowest tastes of its viewers. In L.A., the tawdriness of the Spanish channels contrasts sharply with the seriousness of the channel for Korean immigrants, who come to America with much better educations.

The Spanish networks’ fundamental rule seems to be: “There must be at least one bimbo on screen at all times.”

As opposed to the Bush Administration, whose motto is: “There must always be Hispanic Republicans on the horizon.”

Latin American Immigration Unlikely to Spark A New Renaissance

By Steve Sailer

The recent movie A Day Without A Mexican asks the interesting question: What would happen if California’s twelve million Hispanics suddenly disappeared?

Some slapstick satire ensues as the state’s remaining whites, blacks, and Asians try (and fail) to pick their own oranges, wash their own cars, and care for their own children.

Yet the plot makes the unintended point that Hispanics have contributed far more drudgery than creativity to California. Although the media regularly blither about the “vibrant contributions of Latin-American culture,” the plain truth is that California’s main creative industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—employ few Latinos above the technician level.

But, then, has creativity ever been the strong suit of the Hispanic world? Can we really expect to find much scientific or artistic talent among immigrants from Latin America?

To investigate these questions, I crunched some numbers from Charles Murray’s recent gift to data nerds everywhere, his book Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950.

(Here’s my interview with Murray about his book and my review of it in The American Conservative.)

Murray ranked objectively history’s most important creators and discoverers based on their representation in leading histories and encyclopedias.

For example, to determine the most significant Western visual artists, Murray assembled 14 leading comprehensive works by art historians such as Gombrich and Janson. For each name in each book’s index, he typed into his computer basic measures of importance such as the number of pages mentioning the artist. (No surprise: Michelangelo came out on top.) It’s important to note that Murray’s own opinions played no role in his process.

This sounds simple, perhaps even simple-minded. But these kinds of metrics of eminence have been repeatedly validated over a century of use, beginning with Francis Galton.

The hundreds of scholars upon whom Murray relies have their personal and professional biases. But, ultimately, their need to create coherent narratives explaining who influenced whom means that their books aren’t primarily based on their own tastes, but instead on those of their subjects.

For example, the best single confirmation of the greatness of Beethoven (who ties with Mozart as the most eminent composer in Murray’s tables) might be Brahms’s explanation of why he spent decades fussing before finally unveiling his own First Symphony: “You have no idea how it feels for someone like me to hear behind him the tramp of a giant like Beethoven.” Thus, no musical scholar could leave out Beethoven without also leaving out Brahms, Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner, Mahler, and other composers influenced by Beethoven.

Murray found 4,002 “significant figures” who qualified for inclusion in his database because they were mentioned in at least half the top reference books in their field. He reserved eight of his twenty categories for Asian subjects such as Japanese Painting and Indian Philosophy. That leaves 3,404 significant figures in the twelve fields open to Westerners.

So how did Latin Americans do?

Not terribly well at all: just half of one percent of the most famous scientists and Western artists came from Latin America.

Significant Scientists and Artists: 800 BC to 1950 AD
	Total		Latin Americans			Spaniards
Total	3404		18	0.5%		69	2.0%
Astronomy	124		-	-		1	0.8%
Biology	193		-	-		1	0.5%
Chemistry	204		-	-		1	0.5%
Earth Sciences	85		-	-		-	-
Physics	218		-	-		-	-
Mathematics	191		-	-		-	-
Medicine	160		-	-		-	-
Technology	239		-	-		1	0.4%
Western Art	479		3	0.6%		15	3.1%
Western Literature	835		13	1.6%		33	4.0%
Western Music	522		2	0.4%		13	2.5%
Western Philosophy	154		-	-		4	2.6%

None of the 1,414 scientists who made the cut was a Latin American. That’s not too surprising because the mother country, Spain, contributed only four scientists … and even one of those four was the medieval Muslim astronomer Al-Zarqali!

Latin America did a little better in the sphere of high culture, accounting for 18 (or 0.9%) of the 1,990 top artists, composers, writers, and philosophers in the history of Western Civilization. (I’m including among the Latin Americans the only Brazilian in the database, composer Villa-Lobos.)

Spain has given the world a fair-to-middling 65 cultural creators—3.3% of all significant figures in the history of Western arts and philosophy. But Spain has been in a bit of a creative slump since its brilliant Golden Age of roughly 1550 to about 1660. There have been only 25 Spanish key creators since 1700. In contrast, the small country of the Netherlands developed 46 significant figures just during the 17th Century.

The Hispanic world’s strong suit has been literature, with 13 significant Latin American writers (or 1.6% of the 835 most eminent Western writers). Top Latin American authors include Borges and Neruda. Among the 33 significant Spanish writers (4.0%) are Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Garcia Lorca.

Presumably individual genius is more likely to reach fruition in the field of literature because in the sciences or some of the other, more expensive arts, a high degree of social support for achievement is a precondition.

The three great Mexican muralists of the 20th Century, Rivera, Siqueiros, and Orozco, are the only Latin Americans (0.6%) among the 479 most famous painters and sculptors.

In contrast, fifteen Spaniards (3.1%) made the list, most coming from either Spain’s Golden Age (for instance, Velasquez, Zubaran, de Ribera, and the Crete-born El Greco) or from the 20th Century (such as Picasso, Miro, and Dali). The titanic Goya was the only significant Spanish painter to flourish between the middle of the 17th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century.

Of the 522 best-known classical composers, only two (0.4%) were Latin Americans (Villa-Lobos and the Mexican Carlos Chavez y Ramirez) and thirteen (2.5%) were Spaniards, but most of them were late medieval figures. De Falla is probably the best-known (and perhaps only well-known) Spanish composer. (However, there have been many great Spanish performers, such as Casals and Segovia.)

Among the 154 significant Western philosophers, there are no Latin Americans and four Spaniards. Of these four, however, two were Muslim Moors (Averroes and Avicebron), one the famous Jewish philosopher of the Muslim world, Maimonides, and the fourth was Santayana, who emigrated to the U.S. as a child. On the other hand, two well-known Spanish philosophers arguably should have qualified: Ortega y Gasset and Unamuno (who showed up on the table of top writers instead).

In summary, Spain was a leading European nation up until the middle of the 17th Century, after which it fell into the third rank.

Latin America has always been a backwater of Western Civilization, except in literature.

Murray didn’t cover the last half of the 20th Century, but the long-term trends seem to be continuing. Latin Americans have won a grand total of only three Nobel Prizes in the sciences and Spain only one. In contrast, Denmark has won eight, and the U.S. 206.

Latin America remains more productive in literature than in other fields, with dazzling novelists such as Garcia Marquez and Vargas Llosa. Over the last half century, classical composition, art, and philosophy appear to have been in general decline across the Western world, so Latin America’s lack of innovation in those fields no longer stands out as embarrassingly.

In the realm of popular culture, the last half of the 20th Century witnessed the overwhelming triumph of the U.S.A. Latin American pop music was vastly outgunned by American rock and roll. But even little English-speaking Jamaica wound up having more influence on music than did Cuba, which had been the most musically dynamic Spanish-speaking country. Perhaps Castro’s (hopefully imminent) demise should free up Cuba’s tremendous musical talent.

The more insidious Mexican ruling party bribed its artists into comfortable submission, which may account for the lack of Mexican creativity over the last 50 years. As the PRI fell apart over the last decade, several exciting Mexican movie directors have emerged.

Nonetheless, the bottom line: Latin America has been the least creative outpost of the West. And that probably won’t change much.

America is unlikely to find many creative geniuses among Hispanic immigrants—especially among illegal ones.