There's just one problem: there isn't going to be a non-white majority in the US in the 21st century. And probably not in the 22nd or 23rd, either. The "coming non-white majority" myth is based on a misuse of the arbitrary racial classification system adopted in the 1970s, which assigns all Americans to the categories of white, black, Asian, native American or "Hispanic." According to the government, "Hispanics" may be of any race as long as they are of Latin American ancestry. So, a blond, blue-eyed Argentinian-American whose grandparents showed up from Germany in Argentina mysteriously in 1946 is a "Hispanic" while an Arab-American Muslim is a "non-Hispanic white."
The myth of the non-white majority is based on treating "Hispanic" as the name of a race. Adding all Hispanics to all blacks and Asians makes it possible to claim that California and Texas already have "non-white" majorities, and that the US as a whole will follow in the second half of this century. But if you don't treat Hispanics as members of a single race, then the picture looks quite different. According to the census bureau, the US population in 2050 will look like this: non-Hispanic white, 50.1 per cent; Hispanic, 24.4 per cent; Asian, 8 per cent; black, 14.6 per cent, with a small residuum in other categories. The non-Hispanic white share of the population will drop from 69.4 per cent in 2000 to a bare majority in 2050.
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Nor is there any long-term danger of the US becoming permanently polarised between anglophones and Spanish speakers. Among second-generation Hispanics, roughly half speak no Spanish at all, while fewer than 10 per cent speak only Spanish. By the third and fourth generations, Hispanics in the US are almost completely anglophone. In their rate of linguistic assimilation, they resemble the European immigrants of earlier generations. The claim that in a globalised, wired world the incentives for linguistic assimilation are weakened appears to be false, at least in the case of American Hispanics. And they are the only group that count, in this respect, because all other linguistic minorities in the US are negligible, as a percentage of the total population.
If you put these trends together, you get a mega-trend that is the opposite of the conventional wisdom: when the most recent, yet-to-be-assimilated immigrants are factored out, the long-term trend in the US is towards less racial, cultural and linguistic diversity. There are some causes for concern, notably the possibility that the bipolar white/non-white system will give way to a black/non-black system, with blacks excluded from an informal social definition of "whiteness" that includes Hispanics and Asians. Nonetheless, the melting pot, which blends previously disparate groups into a single group, is still working in the US. In the 20th century, the melting pot turned once-distinct Anglo-Americans, Germans, Irish, Poles, Greeks, Jews, Italians and Lebanese into boringly similar "non-Hispanic whites." In this century, the American melting pot will blend most of today's old and new racial groups into a single English-speaking American cultural majority of mixed, mostly European ancestry.
