EthnicMajority

(Washington Post) America’s historic Chinatowns, home for a century to immigrants seeking social support and refuge from racism, are fading as rising living costs, jobs elsewhere and a desire for wider spaces lure Asian-Americans more than ever to the suburbs.

As the Lunar New Year begins Monday, annual festivities in Washington, D.C.’s shriveled Chinatown are, for the first time, being promoted by a large marketing firm. New York’s Chinatown, one of the nation’s oldest, has lost its status as home to the city’s largest Chinese population, based on the 2010 census.

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(NY Times) Change can be unsettling in a small town. But not long ago in this quiet farming community, with its familiar skyline of grain elevators and church steeples, the owner of a new restaurant decided to acknowledge the community’s diversity by adding some less traditional items to her menu. Cheeseburgers. French fries. Chicken-fried steak.

“American food,” the restaurant owner, Luz Gonzalez, calls it. And she signaled her move by giving her Mexican restaurant a distinctly American name: “The Down-Town Restaurant.”

Such fare was all but extinct in a place where longtime residents joke — often with a barely disguised tone of frustration — that the dining options are Mexican, Mexican or Mexican. After the last white-owned restaurant serving American favorites closed this year, it fell to one of the recent Hispanic arrivals to keep the burgers-and-fries legacy alive. Ms. Gonzalez even enlisted the help of neighbors to teach her to cook more exotic dishes — like potato salad.

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(Los Angeles Times) Increased immigration from South Asia helped fuel the rapid growth in the number of Asian Americans over the last decade as well as an influx of Asians to states such as Nevada, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia, according to an analysis of U.S. Census data released Wednesday.

Growing numbers of Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis and other South Asians highlight the increasing diversity of Asian Americans in the U.S. and the need for policymakers to understand that diversity, according to “A Community of Contrasts,” published by the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice.

Looking at Asian Americans as a single group masks the distinct social and economic needs of the various ethnicities involved, said Dan Ichinose, director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center’s Demographic Research Project. For example, while 23% of Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans lack health insurance, only 8% of Japanese Americans do.

And while 26% of Hmong Americans and 20% of Bangladeshi Americans live below the poverty line, only 6% of Filipinos and 8% of Indians do.

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(NPR) Over the past decade, the story of population growth in the United States was defined largely by the story of Latinos emerging as the nation's largest minority.

They surpassed African-Americans for that distinction, by accounting for 56 percent of America's growth from 2000 to 2010. They now number more than 50 million. Put another way, 1 in every 6 U.S. residents is Latino.

Hispanics remain heavily concentrated in states such as California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Florida and New York. The majority reside in just three of those states — California, Texas and Florida.

Yet the 2010 count showed that Hispanics have begun to fully spread across the nation.

Their populations increased in virtually every state. And on the local level, Hispanics increased their populations in 2,962 of America's 3,142 counties. They declined in number in 108 counties.

The greatest gains occurred in the South and Midwest, which have had traditionally low Hispanic populations, but have attracted Hispanics with lower costs of living and jobs in agriculture.

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(Newser) In eight metropolitan areas including Washington, DC, New York, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Memphis, minorities now make up the majority of the population, according to census data. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites have become the minority in 22 of the 100 largest urban areas in the US, the Washington Post reports. In 42 of those 100 regions, the raw number of white people fell, but the percentage of whites fell in every single metro area. A big reason? The white population is aging, while the Hispanic and Asian populations fueling the growth are relatively young.

The shift happened shockingly fast, even to many officials. “What’s happened is pivotal,” says one demographer, noting that these regions will be the testing ground for how to “help minorities assimilate and become part of the labor force.” Another report notes the “literally mind-boggling” situation in Northern Virginia’s schools, where the student population grew by 119,000 over the past 15 years—white students accounted for just shy of 1,000 of those. The demographic shift is even starting to transform traditionally Republican areas to more Democratic ones, one expert notes.

(Huffington Post) The same Republican strategist who presciently focused his party's resources on winning state legislatures in the last election is now trying to patch up the party's relationship with Hispanic voters, with an eye toward saving the GOP from itself.

Ed Gillespie, the 48-year-old former White House adviser to President George W. Bush, announced Monday that he is spearheading an effort to recruit at least 100 Hispanic candidates to run for seats in state legislatures around the country in 2012.

"The demographics of America are changing, and any political party that fails to recognize that is going to find themselves consigned to minority status in the not too distant future," Gillespie said on a conference call with reporters.

The new effort will be run out of the Republican State Leadership Committee, where Gillespie took over as chairman in 2009. The RSLC raised $30 million in the 2010 election cycle, and RSLC president Chris Jankowski said the group will spend at least $3 million on the Hispanic recruitment project.

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(Examiner.com) A large—and growing––segment of the Southern California population is of Mexican origin. According to a report released July 14, 2011 by the Pew Hispanic Center , the fast-growing population in the U.S. of people of Mexican origin increased far more in the last decade from births than from immigration from Mexico. The report noted that following one of the largest mass migrations in modern history, which brought more than 10 million Mexicans to live in the U.S. from 1970 to 2007, the number of immigrants arriving fell off sharply in recent years. During that period, a majority of the Mexican immigrants who settled here are young and in their childbearing years; thus, this population growth encompasses women’s healthcare. The report found that from 2000 to 2010, about 7.2 million infants of Mexican origin were born in the U.S. while 4.2 million new immigrants arrived from Mexico.

About 31.8 million people of Mexican origin now comprise 10% of the U.S. population; this group also represents and nearly two-thirds of all Hispanics in the nation. “The immigration of the last decades built up a relatively young population that is having births,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center, an author of the report. The figures, which are based on recent census data from the United States and Mexico, include Mexican-born immigrants living in this country and Hispanic Americans who trace their ancestry to Mexico.

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(Ethnicmajority, Clifford Tong) Last week a study was published by the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research showing one in five American moms had children with more than one birth father. This type of family structure is even more common among minority women: 59% for African American, and 35% for Hispanic mothers.

While one might think this is attributed to teenage unwed mothers having boatloads of kids before they reach voting age, the data show that this is not the case. 43% of the women who had kids with multiple fathers were married at the time they had their first child. This is indicative that many of these families are the by-product of divorce, not unwed mothers.

Although this is relatively new research and some of the results seem inconclusive, I’m ready to jump to some conclusions. I think it is pretty clear that women have generally waited longer to get married and have children, for a variety of reasons. And although divorce rates are high, children of divorce should have a better chance at a stable household given that their parents are more likely to be mature and financially viable enough to provide it. So I think this age trend is pushing the statistics down, not up.

That means that the data, and more importantly the impact on the children, is still heavily skewed toward mothers who are young, unwed, uneducated, low income, and minority. Given these characteristics, there are many geographical areas where this is the cultural norm, where having a baby is viewed as a short-term status symbol rather than the life commitment and challenge that it is.

Whatever we’re doing to educate our young people about teenage pregnancy, it’s not working. This sounds like a cultural norm that is an epidemic.

(Ethnicmajority, Clifford Tong) The new 2010 census shows significant population growth in both the Hispanic and Asian communities, but this is only part of the story. The Hispanic population has reached 50 million, one out of every six Americans. What is interesting is where that growth is occurring – in the rural areas. Hispanics in North Carolina rose 111% over the last decade, for instance. African Americans are also moving in droves out of cities to suburban and rural communities.

And yet Hispanics continue to be under-represented in politics, boardrooms, media, etc. while being hammered on the immigration front. But the challenges aren’t just political. Consumers tend to speak with their wallets. I found it very interesting that all of the best selling baseball jerseys are for white players, despite the fact that the sports’ best players are Latino.

Mainstream America may be diverse in numbers, but not in attitude. The UCLA student’s YouTube video rant against Asian Americans is just the latest example debunking President Obama’s ideal that we are “one America”.

But significant challenges face the Hispanic community today. Less than half earn high school degrees and one in eight graduate from college. According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Preganancy, 52 percent of Latina teens get pregnant at least once before age 20.

In the meantime, Hispanics continue to be made a scapegoat for the economic recession by Republicans trying to make illegal immigration a political wedge issue. That can work as long as Hispanics face the aforementioned challenges and lack the political and economic clout to fight back. You have to be encouraged by the battle over union collective bargaining in Wisconsin, which showed that Americans are increasing rejecting political battles to encourage class or race warfare. These are issues for all Americans, not just some Americans.

(AsianWeek) The Asian American Advertising Federation (3AF), a leading authority on Asian American marketing and advertising, in conjunction with LA 18 KSCI-TV (LA 18), announced today some astonishing statistics about the growth of Asians in the United States. The information is based on the 2010 U.S. Census Redistricting Data.

With data reported from 27 states (or a little more than half of the state-level data at the time of reporting), the Asian population is already seeing significant growth that far outpaces the total United States population by huge margins. All 27 states showed double or even triple-digit growth in their Asian populations. The top five states with the highest increases in the Asian population compared to ten years ago are: Nevada, up 116 percent; North Carolina, up 85 percent; Delaware up 78 percent; Arkansas, up 77 percent; and Indiana up 74 percent.

Among the 27 states with their local-level data released so far, the top 10 states with the highest number of Asians (in order from highest to lowest) are California; Texas; New Jersey; Hawaii; Illinois; Washington; Virginia; Maryland; North Carolina, and Nevada.

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