Latino, Asian Populations Rise Sharply

The government Thursday released the first official census 2000 figures, showing a rapid growth of Latino and Asian populations--even in areas of the Deep South and Midwest.

The Latino population in Wisconsin, for example, grew by 107% during the 1990s, to 192,921.

In Mississippi, the Asian population grew by at least 50% and as much as 84%--a range that takes into account a new option that allowed people to check off more than one racial category for the first time.

The census figures also suggested that African Americans continue to return to the South--strengthening a trend that surfaced in the 1990 census. In Virginia, the African American population grew by at least 19% and as much as 23%--well above the state’s overall growth rate of 14.4%.

The existence of multiracial categories in this census complicates efforts to compare the sizes of different population groups. Across the country, for example, the Latino population may have surpassed that of African Americans. The census pegs the number of Latinos at 35.5 million. The number of blacks could be as low as 34.2 million or as high as 36.4 million depending on whether one counts only people who said they were solely black or all those who said they were at least partially black.

For all such comparisons, “it’s going to make a big difference, depending on how you count the groups,” said Dowell Myers, a USC demographics expert.

To add to the complication, there is some debate about the numbers for Latinos, swelled by hard-to-count undocumented workers.

In Wisconsin, Mississippi, New Jersey and Virginia--the four states for which detailed data were released Thursday--tens of thousands of people took advantage of the opportunity to claim more than one racial ancestry. In New Jersey, people claiming more than one race accounted for 2.5% of the state population, or 213,755 individuals. Detailed data for other states will be released later this month.

The most striking demographic development in Thursday’s data appears to be the spreading out of Latinos and Asians beyond such traditional immigrant-receiving cities as Los Angeles and New York.

“The microcosm of California is now writ large,” said Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Urban Institute who is closely tracking the census.

As Joe Salvo, New York City’s chief demographer, put it: “New York and L.A. are at the forefront--it happens first here.”

“What you are starting to see is a national trend that goes beyond the major metropolitan centers and ultimately reaches places you don’t particularly associate with immigrants,” he said.

As they disperse, Asians and Latinos are pursuing very different kinds of economic opportunities, said John Mollenkopf, a sociologist at the City University of New York. Latinos are forming the backbone of the agricultural work force in parts of the South, and Asian entrepreneurs and professionals are venturing into smaller cities.

“There are Mexican workers in the chicken processing plants throughout the small towns of the South,” Mollenkopf said. “Asians are coming in with much higher skill and education levels. Indian doctors have been a mainstay of big city hospitals and now they are gravitating out to other towns.”

The dispersal of Latinos and Asians will have a growing effect on culture and government, as their traditions find new expressions and their concerns become issues for political debate.

“Native-born whites have been gravitating out of areas of high immigration,” Mollenkopf said. “In a sense, what we’re seeing now is that they can never get away from this issue of immigration--it’s going to turn up in small cities in North Carolina.”

Once the destination of more than one-third of all immigrants, California now gets less than a quarter of them, Passel said. Many are now heading for a belt of states that spreads from Oregon and Idaho to Mississippi. Statistics for North Carolina, for example, are expected to show a flourishing Mexican American enclave.

Although the dispersal of Asians and Latinos is noteworthy, some demographers pointed out that numerically, these groups are still a small proportion of the overall population in many places.

Though the Asian population in Mississippi grew much faster than either the white or African American population, it ranged only from 18,349 to 22,514 individuals, taking into account those who checked more than one race.

“These states are still predominantly white, or in Mississippi’s case, white and black,” said William Frey, a demographer with the Milken Institute, a nonprofit economic think tank. Ethnic diversity remains “the icing on the cake” in many localities, he said.

The 2000 census--offering 63 possible racial combinations--will yield the fullest picture ever of the nation’s diversity. It also may be the most confusing. Although most industrialized nations use socioeconomic data to classify their populations, the United States continues to use race. Now that people are allowed to pick multiple racial categories, the census may become a truer picture of society, yet one that is more puzzling to digest.

In the four states for which statistics were released Thursday, the number of people claiming multiracial ancestry was smaller than the 5% some demographers anticipated. In New Jersey, 2.5% of the population claimed a mixed race background; in Virginia, 2%; in Wisconsin, 1.2%; and in Mississippi, 0.7%. By far the most common combination of races selected was white and African American.

Thursday’s numbers were transmitted to capitals in the four states for use in redrawing boundaries of legislative districts, and then released to the public.

Tabulations for seven more states--Arkansas, Indiana, Louisiana, Pennsylvania, South Dakota, Texas and Vermont--also are due out this week. California statistics are not expected for at least two weeks.

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Alonso-Zaldivar reported from Washington and Fields from Los Angeles.

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The Rise in Racial Groups

Census 2000 is the first to allow people to report themselves as belonging to more than one race. As a result, the issue of how much a racial group has grown since the last census, in 1990, depends on whether one counts those who say they are at least partially of the race in question or those who say they are members of that race only. These figures show the range for whites, blacks and Asians in four states released Thursday. For Latinos, which the census counts separately, only a maximum figure is shown.

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Source: Census Bureau