There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century

by Fiona Hill

Consider that baby boomers, the generation of Americans born between World War II and the mid-1960s, are 82 percent white. Now consider the fact that within a century of this generation’s starting point, the nation will have undergone a demographic sea change. By 2045, if demographic trends across the subsequent generations adhere to current projections, the United States will be overall “majority minority.” But this is not happening for the reason that many people think: according to U.S. Census Bureau data, the Pew Research Center, and my colleagues at the Brookings Institution, the racial shifts of the most diverse recent cohort, Generation Z, born after the mid-1990s, are driven by domestic, internal, and personal factors such as interracial marriage and birthrates; they are not the result of immigration, which has been increasingly restricted by government policy in recent years.