The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

The Baby Boom generation was the most culturally stable (or as we would say today, the “least diverse”) generation in American history. The 1970 census, the first in which all the Boomers were present, was the only one since the founding of the republic two centuries before in which the foreign-born population was below 5 percent. Immigration still came largely from Europe. The three largest sources of foreign-born were Italy (1,009,000), Germany (833,000), and Canada (812,000). Twenty-first-century readers, accustomed to much higher numbers, might need to be told that those were total resident populations, not annual arrivals. There were only 760,000 Mexicans in the country, slightly more than the number of people from the United Kingdom, Poland, or the Soviet Union. Mexico and Cuba were the only non-European countries in the top ten. By 2010, there would be no European countries at all on the top ten list. Here it is: Mexico, China, India, the Philippines, Vietnam, El Salvador, Cuba, Korea, the Dominican Republic, and Guatemala.