Demographics: The nation has passed Peak White People, at least according to the Census Bureau’s new 2017 Population Estimate released Thursday. According to The Hill’s Reid Wilson, this is the first time ever that the nation’s non-Hispanic white population has decreased in a one-year period. It’s largely a matter of declining birth rates, relative to death rates, for white persons (also known as natural decrease), though a contributing factor is the low levels of immigration from European countries.
The decline is still very small, relatively speaking: the nation’s white-alone population declined by only 0.02 percent, staying near 197.8 million (and in fact, the “white alone or in combination” population, which includes multi-racial persons, still increased). The fastest-growing segment of the population is, as has been the case for several years now, not Hispanics but rather Asians; the Asian population gained at a rate of 3.1 percent to a total of 22.2 million, largely because of immigration rather than birth rates.
The Census Bureau’s release also took a deep dive into the median age of various states and counties; the state with the highest median age is, interestingly, Maine, at 44.7 years (up from 42.7 years in 2010). Florida still barely has a higher percentage of senior citizens than Maine does (20.1 in Florida, 19.9 in Maine), but highly-diverse Florida also has a lot more kids than does Maine, currently also one of the whitest states in the nation.
Only 531 of the nation’s 3,000+ counties saw their median age go down between 2010 and 2017; more than half of those counties were in the Midwest. That’s partly because of a growing Hispanic population there but also because of some fast-growing areas where resource extraction is attracting young adult males. (For instance, the county with the single biggest decline in median age in those years, Williams County, North Dakota — where the median age fell 7.1 years — was the center of the fracking-related population boom of several years ago.)