The changing face of America

countries & regions — By Bob Riel on January 27, 2009 at 4:36 pm

America is changing. Always. It’s part of the deal in this country of immigrants. And yet, for all of the ways in which immigration has in the past forged new concepts of nationhood, nothing really compares to the present. The United States has become a stunningly multicultural place and is becoming more so with each passing year.

Newsweek did a nice job of covering this topic recently in a story titled Who We Are Now. They noted that:

The tension between assimilation and separation is eternal, but there is no doubt that this flood of immigration and the breaking down of barriers between previously estranged groups within the country has created a much more fluid culture than previous generations might have thought possible…

And 2009 is only the beginning of the story. According to Pew, if current trends continue, the U.S. population will rise from 296 million in 2005 to 438 million in 2050. Eighty-two percent—let me repeat that: 82 percent—of the increase will be attributable to immigrants arriving after 2005 and to their descendants. By that point, whites may make up only 47 percent of the country, ending centuries of a majority-white America.

Meanwhile, this passage also caught my eye in an article about the country’s new first family:

For well over two centuries, the United States has been vastly more diverse than its ruling families. Now the Obama family has flipped that around, with a Technicolor cast that looks almost nothing like their overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly Protestant predecessors in the role. The family that produced Barack and Michelle Obama is black and white and Asian, Christian, Muslim and Jewish. They speak English; Indonesian; French; Cantonese; German; Hebrew; African languages including Swahili, Luo and Igbo; and even a few phrases of Gullah, the Creole dialect of the South Carolina Lowcountry.

That’s the changing face of America.