The U.S. Bureau of the Census has projected that America will have a “non-white” majority by 2044. A new and quite stunning article in the Winter 2016 issue of The American Prospect (a left-of-center journal) debunks that claim and undermines the widespread faith that the Census Bureau knows what it is doing.

The article, by the sociologist Richard Alba, is entitled “The Likely Persistence of a White Majority: How Census Bureau statistics have misled thinking about the American future.” Its two key arguments are simple.

First, the Census Bureau counts all children of mixed parentage as minority, regardless of how they identify themselves:

In the Census Bureau’s projections, children with one Hispanic, Asian, or black parent are counted as minority (that is, as Hispanic or nonwhite). Under alternative ways of counting, the potential range of variation in the size of the white population is quite large. . . . If we were to go to the opposite extreme from the bureau’s official projections and . . . classify anyone with some white ancestry as white, the data show that whites would make up three-quarters of the population at mid-century, when the Census publicly claims that whites will be in the minority.
Although the Census Bureau declared in 2012 that nonwhite births for the first time outnumbered white ones, 60 percent of the 2013 infants have a white parent. About 10 percent, then, have both a white and minority parent. These infants are counted as minorities in census statistics.
Overall, about one of every seven infants comes now from an ethno-racially mixed family . . . the Census Bureau data exaggerate the decline of the white population by failing to take into account that many children from mixed backgrounds will likely be integrated into largely white social milieus and identify, at least some of the time, as white . . .

#share#Second, the Census Bureau assumes that definitions of who is “white” and who is “minority” are fixed. But as we know from American history, immigrant groups such as Italians and Jews were once viewed as “non-white,” and are now part of the “white majority.” As Alba says, “‘Whiteness’ . . . has never been fixed; it is a malleable concept, and it is on its way to changing again, as it has before.” Thus his argument about assimilation and definitions of the majority:

A second reason to be skeptical about the excited talk about the end of a white majority is that it ignores the potential for blurring the boundary between mainstream and minority. The United States has previously seen excluded minorities such as the Irish, Italians, and Jews assimilate into the mainstream . . .
Projected changes in the racial and ethnic composition of a society also depend on the rules for classifying people. The Census Bureau assumes that every individual is either white or minority and resolves the complexities of multiple heritages by assigning people with any mixed background to the minority side of the white/nonwhite divide.

Here’s an example. The way the Census Bureau reports, the children of Ted and Heidi Cruz are now and forever “minorities” because they have one Latino grandparent, Ted Cruz’s Cuban-born father. Same for the children of Jeb Bush: now and forever “minorities.” Of such nonsense are these Census statistics composed.

RELATED: America’s Persistent White Majority

Alba notes “the rapidly growing presence of Americans from recent waves of immigration at the top of the U.S. workforce” and reports that “the expanding groups in the upper ranks of the workforce are Asians, both immigrant and U.S.-born, and U.S.-born Latinos . . . ” The old melting pot is still melting new immigrant populations. They are assimilating, though obviously at different rates for different groups and in different cities and states.

Alba concludes that “this assimilation should disabuse us of the fantasy of the imminent demise of the white majority and its loss of power.” Most of us will be less interested in the “power” question than Alba (whose lefty politics mar the article), and more interested in the remarkable amount of intermarriage and assimilation — and the failure of the Census Bureau to explain it. Alba strongly criticizes the Bureau:

To think clearly about the American future, we need not only the right concepts but also accurate data. The Census Bureau, the public agency we all rely on for neutral representations of social realities, is failing us. Not only do its rigid and illogical classifications distort important new realities, the bureau is also not forthcoming about the errors and uncertainties involved.

So America’s “white majority” turns out to be sticking around for a while — whether the Census Bureau likes it or not.