The Census Bureau reports that for the first time, two Hispanic surnames — Garcia and Rodriguez — are in the top ten (Lopez is no. 21, Kathryn). Naturally, the first person the NYT story quotes is a racial chauvinist from Miami who’s quite clear that for him the purpose of immigration is to make America less American:

“It shows we’re getting stronger,” Mr. Padilla said. “If there’s that many of us to outnumber the Anglo names, it’s a great thing.”

And, in fact, we are in the historically unprecedented situation of seeing the majority of new immigration come from a single ethnic group. On the other hand, part of the reason is simply the extreme lack of variety among the surnames of Hispanic, and especially Mexican, immigrants, so you have lots of people with the same names. In contrast, I didn’t see a single Italian name among the top 1,000, despite the fact that there are something like 16 million people who report their ancestry as Italian. And I thought this was really cool:

Altogether, the census found six million surnames in the United States. Among those, 151,000 were shared by a hundred or more Americans. Four million were held by only one person.

One person!