Children of immigrants reshaping America

Research is showing that the children of immigrants are rapidly assimilating and even transforming America. They are crossing cultural and language barriers that their parents are unable to do. DP

Booming ‘second generation’ becoming the mainstream, research suggests

By Alex Johnson and Maria Menounos, Reporters - msnbc.com and NBC News

msnbc.msn.com: The future of America is being forged at Dumbarton Middle School.

With students from 37 countries, Dumbarton, a magnet school in Towson, Md., near Baltimore, reflects how the United States is rapidly being transformed into a polyglot, multicultural society — not by immigrants, but by their children.

Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau paint a clear picture: By as early as 2023, more than half of all children will be members of what are now minority groups, an evolution fueled significantly by a baby boom among recent immigrants. By 2050, they will make up more than 60 percent of all American children.

By 2050, the number of Americans of Hispanic origin will double to comprise a third of the American population. The Asian population is projected to nearly triple, to 9.2 percent of the population. And as those populations mingle, the number of people who identify themselves as being of two or more races will more than triple.

The result will be a United States in which the so-called white majority will, for the first time, be in the minority.

In the process, the children of new immigrants “will not only reshape American racial and ethnic relations but define the character of American social, cultural, and political life,” researchers at Harvard University and City University of New York write in “Inheriting the City,” a landmark study of the children of first-generation immigrants to the United States.
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