Last week, The Times reported that California demographers had scaled back their state population projections for 2040, citing a sharp decline in the Latino birthrate. They had overestimated population growth in part because their assumptions incorporated a 1970s nostalgia that treated culture the same way that Americans have always regarded race.
As a result, the demographers didn't properly take into account assimilation and its effect on fertility across generations of immigrants. As with previous newcomers, today's second generation tends to have fewer children than the first, and the third fewer still.
Americans traditionally considered race as unchangeable and biologically determined. Culture and ethnicity, by contrast, were seen as less innate and more malleable; they changed and adapted over time. Though it was scandalous for a black man to "pass" for white, it was always more acceptable for a Jew to pass for a WASP (think Ralph Lauren) or a Mexican to identify herself as Italian or Spanish (think New Mexico).
Incorporating this idea into its questions, the Census Bureau asked Americans about their parents' place of birth. This allowed analysts to sort the data across at least three generations. The first generation reported being foreign-born, the second native-born to foreign-born parents and the third and beyond were native-born to native-born parents.
In 1970, ancestry replaced parent's place of birth in the bureau's decennial questionnaire. This shift was a product of the times. Only 5% of the U.S. population was foreign-born then, the lowest percentage in American history.
Many latter-generation Americans felt alienated from their ethnic roots; others reacted to the emergence of black nationalism. The new ideology of multiculturalism attracted them. Though many of its adherents were thoroughly assimilated, an increasing number of Americans of all backgrounds came to see the U.S. as less of a melting pot and more of a confederation of permanently separate races, ethnicities and cultures.
Multiculturalism emphasized and celebrated cultural continuity across generations. It preached that a third-generation Japanese American had more in common with his foreign-born grandmother than with his fifth-generation Polish American neighbor.
