Census survey: Whites not majority in Texas anymore
06:33 PM CDT on Thursday, August 26, 2004
Associated Press

HOUSTON – White non-Hispanics are no longer the majority in Texas for the first time since the 1800s, according to a Census Bureau survey released Thursday.

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  The survey said whites stopped being the majority as of last year. The bureau also released statistics that showed Texas joined only Illinois and North Carolina in having a poverty rate that measurably increased while income decreased in 2002-03.
  State demographer Steve Murdock said the two trends are related as economic woes have slowed white migration from other states. Most of Texas' population expansion since 2000 has come from births and international immigration, both sources of predominantly Hispanic growth.
  
  
• Estimates show Texas was 49.5 percent white in 2003, down 1.5 percentage points from 2002 but still a large plurality. Almost all the loss was made up by Hispanics, who made up about 35.3 percent of the populace.
  "The future of Latinos is the future of Texas, as the population numbers show," said Luis Figueroa, legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
  
• The black population remained basically flat at around 10.8 percent. Asian-Americans now accounted for about 3 percent of Texas.
  The dip of whites below the 50 percent mark was inevitable, although its occurrence in 2003 was at the early end of the predicted scale, Murdock said.
  "We thought it probably would happen this year or next, so it's only a year different," Murdock said. "It does indicate that Hispanic growth is occurring more rapidly than we anticipated it would."
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  Murdock said Texas' continued explosion in Hispanic growth, fueled largely by international immigration that made up 36 percent of the state's growth from April 2000 to July 2003, helps explain the socio-economic numbers.
  

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