When It Comes to Immigrants, Trump Strikes Out.

About ten years ago, or maybe slightly earlier, I started noticing the almost daily comments in the media about how the population of the United States would a majority non-white at some point over the next twenty or thirty years. The primary reason for this shift in the racial composition of the national population was the disappearance of immigrants from Europe and the increased immigration from regions with non-white populations, like Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Rim.

The largest bloc of immigrants, however, were coming into the country from south of the Rio Grande, and while the racial makeup of this population is largely white, their lack of English language facility, their poverty, and the so-called influx of ‘illegals’ among them more or less stick them in the non-white group.

What the government has done to address and diminish the issue of the racialization of newly arrived individuals is to define the national population in terms of ‘native-born’ and ‘foreign born,’ and then to make a secondary comparison among ‘foreign born’ between naturalized as opposed to non-naturalized residents, the latter being considered by many of us as being no different than non-white.

The Census Bureau has just released a very detailed report on where foreign-born people live in the United States, and you can read it…