Demographer says it’s “basically over for Anglos” in Texas

The February 24 Houston Chronicle reports:

Looking at population projections for Texas, demographer Steve Murdock concludes: “It’s basically over for Anglos.”

Two of every three Texas children are now non-Anglo and the trend line will become even more pronounced in the future, said Murdock, former U.S. Census Bureau director and now director of the Hobby Center for the Study of Texas at Rice University.

Today’s Texas population can be divided into two groups, he said. One is an old and aging Anglo and the other is young and minority. Between 2000 and 2040, the state’s public school enrollment will see a 15 percent decline in Anglo children while Hispanic children will make up a 213 percent increase, he said.

The state’s largest county—Harris—will shed Anglos throughout the coming decades. By 2040, Harris County will have about 516, 000 fewer Anglos than lived in the Houston area in 2000, while the number of Hispanics will increase by 2.5 million during the same period, Murdock said. The projection assumes a net migration rate equal to one-half of 1990-2000.

Most of the state’s population growth is natural, Murdock told the House Mexican American Legislative Caucus today. About 22 percent of the growth comes from people moving to Texas from other states.

About 6 percent of the state’s population is not documented, he said.

By 2040, only 20 percent of the state’s public school enrollment will be Anglo, he said. Last year, non-Hispanic white children made up 33.3 percent of the state’s 4.8 million public school enrollment.

Of the state’s 254 counties, 79 recorded declining population during the past 20 years. All are rural. An additional 30 Texas counties, he said, would have also lost population had they not experienced Hispanic growth.

The state’s future looks bleak assuming the current trend line does not change because education and income levels for Hispanics lag considerably behind Anglos, he said.

Unless the trend line changes, 30 percent of the state’s labor force will not have even a high school diploma by 2040, he said. And the average household income will be about $6,500 lower than it was in 2000. That figure is not inflation adjusted so it will be worse than what it sounds.

“It’s a terrible situation that you are in. I am worried,” Murdock said.

[end of article]

LA writes:

“The state’s future looks bleak assuming the current trend line does not change because education and income levels for Hispanics lag considerably behind Anglos, he said.”

It’s remarkable that the demographer would state this so baldly, though oddly the Chronicle doesn’t provide a direct quote but its own paraphrase, which makes the paper as much the source of the statement as the demographer. I can’t remember offhand seeing any mainstream person or entity stating so simply that if a state becomes largely Hispanic, it must become largely poor. For example, I don’t remember anything from the Center for Immigration Studies ever making such a forthright statement on this subject.

Unfortunately, the article as a whole is confusingly written in that it focuses on changes in the ethnic composition of school populations and in individual counties, but doesn’t state what the overall ethnic composition of the state is becoming.

Back in the 1980s, demographer Leon Bouvier—whose demographic projections I presented at the end of chapter one of The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism—said that states such as California and Texas were becoming nonwhite majority. I wrote:

According to an earlier study by Bouvier, assuming one million new arrivals per year, of whom 23 percent settle in California, non-Hispanic whites in California will become a minority shortly after the year 2000.

And that is exactly what happened.

While I didn’t produce Bouvier’s demographic projections for Texas, he also said that Texas would become nonwhite majority early in the 21st century.

- end of initial entry -

A reader from New York, who sent the Houston Chronicle article, writes:

I am reminded of a girl I worked with 10 years ago, about the time I began thinking about illegal immigration, race, etc. She was a Texan, born and bred. Although she was Republican and I (then) Democrat, I was even then more conservative than she was on values subjects. (Digression: her sorry example taught me that the kind of person described as “socially liberal and fiscally conservative” is perhaps the most destructive kind. At least people who are socially liberal and fiscally liberal are consistent and principled. The former type have no principles at all.)

OK, at one point she told me that the main topic of conversation at parties in her parents’ set was “how much do you pay “them”.” “Them” being illegal aliens.

I asked her if it didn’t worry her that eventually illegals might change the demographic character of the state. Nope. Did it bother her that (as she told me) state coffers were negatively affected by illegals crossing the border at Brownsville and dropping babies? Nope.

She was all in favor of same-sex marriage (this was beginning to be discussed in NY). She watched WILL AND GRACE faithfully.

She was, in short, a Bush Republican—not George (bad enough) but Jenna (much worse).

She wasn’t stupid, Mr. Auster. She told me that when she went to kindergarten, she was already able to read on a 2nd grade level. She breezed through U-Texas.

But she was thoughtless. I don’t know where she is but I am fairly sure that her class still can’t see the writing on the wall, even though it’s written in huge Day-Glo letters. Perhaps because the words are in Spanish?

This is another example which contributes to the “end times” feeling you are having. I don’t believe the Biblical “end times” are literally upon us, but we are in “end times” in the sense that a time has ended and another one is beginning.

By the next presidential election it will feel as if we are in a different country entirely. I welcome this feeling—because we ARE in a different country. It is necessary for Americans to feel this and not just think it in order to change things and to cease cooperating with our own dispossession.


Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 26, 2011 04:22 PM | Send
    

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