Demographer maps America

Published 9:00 pm Thursday, July 27, 2006

WASHINGTON – On Oct. 17, a Hispanic woman, living somewhere in Los Angeles, will give birth to a baby boy. It will be a landmark moment. The arrival of her son will make the population of the United States hit 300 million for the first time.

Or so predicts William Frey, an internationally regarded demographer from the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“It is a little speculative,” he said, laughing.

Still, it is the accuracy of his predictions in the early 1990s about age and race that have made him a go-to guy for the media.

Frey’s “map of America” turned into reality in the 2000 census. His research about the shifting population of the United States, documented in more than 100 publications and several books, has made headlines in the Economist, the New Yorker, Forbes and numerous newspapers.

Looking to 2026, Frey, 59, imagines a country that is even more diverse, where many more people are bilingual and more road signs and products are labeled in English and Spanish. He imagines a country split by age, with older and younger states driven by different political interests.

“I like to tweak conventional wisdom,” Frey said from his office, where reports and political magazines are sprawled across his desk. “People think of America as a melting pot, but that is a generalization. Some areas are, and others are not too different than they were 20 years ago.”

Frey has pinpointed three Americas: the multicultural “melting pot” states, the predominantly white heartlands and the “New Sunbelts” that are pulling in young suburbanites.

What will change going forward? In 10 years, minorities are expected to make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population, Frey said. Ten years after that, they will have a plethora of high-profile positions as members of Congress, judges and business leaders, he predicted.

Some will have moved from the melting-pot areas to growing states such as Nevada and Arizona. But other places, such as the Midwest, will remain largely white, he said. There, baby boomers will stay settled while younger residents move away. This will lift the age of the population and shift the political landscape.

That will be one America, he said. But elsewhere, the number of under-35s will be on the increase.

Talk of race will have changed dramatically, Frey said. By 2026, “federally discussed racial categories,” as they are used today, will be far less meaningful, he predicts. In Los Angeles, 25 percent of the population will be mixed race, and 20 percent in New York will be mixed race.

One in six babies born that year will most likely not fall into a single category, he said, citing a rising number of relationships between Hispanics and Asians and other races.

Frey has already written about the emerging New Sunbelts, which includes states such as Washington and Idaho, and Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia. There, younger families that are no longer able to afford suburbia in California or New Jersey will move in.

In 20 years, they will be long settled and pushing their “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” political interests to the fore.

“They are chasing the American dream,” Frey said. “It used to be a home with a Chevy and a television. Now it is a McMansion, an SUV and a satellite dish.”