Arizona, Boomers, and USA's demographic future

Once again we see that selfish, self-absorbed Baby Boomers are the root cause of all America's problems. But unfortunately they all vote.

Will Arizona Be America's Future?
Immigration, Demographics, Race, Regions and States

By William H. Frey, Senior Fellow, Metropolitan Policy Program
April 28, 2010 | The Brookings Institution

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Demographically, there is no doubt Latinos and other immigrant minorities are America's future, and on this, Arizona stands on the front lines. Over the past two decades the state has seen its Latino population grow by 180 percent as its racial composition shifted from 72 to 58 percent white.

Yet there is an important demographic nuance to this growth—providing context to the white backlash in Arizona in ways that could play out else where. It is the fact that the state's swift Hispanic growth has been concentrated in young adults and children, creating a "cultural generation gap" with largely white baby boomers and older populations, the same demographic that predominates in the recent Tea Party protests. A shorthand measure for this cultural generation gap in a state is the disparity between children and seniors in their white population shares. Arizona leads the nation on this gap at 40 (where 43 percent of its child population is white compared with 83 percent for seniors). But the states of Nevada (34 percent), California (33 percent), Texas (32 percent), New Mexico (31 percent), and Florida (29 percent) are not that far behind. (See Table 1).

Nationally this gap is 25 percentage points.

The appeal of anti-immigrant, anti-Latino messages among boomers and seniors may seem surprising especially because the former are so closely associated with 1960s era liberalism and Civil Rights. Yet this stereotype hardly applies to all boomers and recent presidential elections have shown them to be either politically split or, in the case of white boomer men, veering toward the right. Moreover, boomers grew up in a more insular America than did their parents or their children. Between 1946 and 1964, the years of the boom, the immigrant share of the nation's population shrunk to an all-time low (under 5 percent) and those who did arrive were largely whites from Europe. Most boomers grew up and lived much of their lives in predominantly white suburbs, residentially isolated from minorities.