For a brief moment last month—roughly a 72-hour span
beginning at 11:00 p.m. on November 6 and concluding late in the evening of
November 9—everyone in America was interested in demographics. That’s
because, in addition to rewarding the just, punishing the wicked, and
certifying that America was (for the moment) not racist, President Barack
Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney pointed to two ineluctable demographic truths.
The first was expected: that the growth of the Hispanic-American cohort is
irresistible and will radically transform our country’s ethnic future. The
second caught people by surprise: that the proportion of unmarried Americans
was suddenly at an all-time high.
Unfortunately, by the time the window closed on the
public’s demographic curiosity no one really understood either of these shifts.
Or where they came from. Or whether they were even particularly true. As is
often the case, people tended to fixate on a relatively small, contingent part
of America’s changing demographic makeup and look past the bigger, more
consequential part of the story.
So let’s begin by asking the obvious question:
Hispanics are America’s demographic future—true or false? The answer is,
both. Sort of.
Start with what we know. As of the 2010 census, there
were 308.7 million people in America, 50.5 million of whom (16 percent) were
classified as being of “Hispanic origin.” Of that 50 million, about half are
foreign-born legal immigrants. Another 11 million or so are illegal immigrants.
A few other facts, just to give you some texture: 63 percent of American
Hispanics trace their origins to Mexico, 9.2 percent to Puerto Rico, and 3.5
percent to Cuba. And more than half of the 50 million live in just three
states, California, Texas, and Florida.
But what makes people’s heads snap to attention when
they talk about Hispanic demographics isn’t any of that stuff. It’s the rate of
increase. From 2000 to 2010, America’s Hispanic population jumped by 43
percent, while our total population increased by just 9.7 percent. Or, to put
it another way, from 2000 to 2010, America grew by 27.3 million people.
Fifteen million of those faces—more than half of those new Americans—were
Hispanic.
If you extrapolate those trends the numbers get even
more eye-popping. In 2008, the Pew Research Center projected that, at current
rates, by 2050 there would be 128 million Hispanic Americans, making the
group 29 percent of the American population. The census projection is a little
higher; they guess the total will be 132.8 million, 30 percent of a projected
total population of 439 million.
Where do these numbers come from? It’s not rocket
science. Demographers depend mainly on two variables: net migration to the
United States by people from Spanish-speaking countries and the fertility rate
of Hispanic Americans.
The big 130-million projections come from assumptions
based on the 2000 census. Back then, immigration from south of the border was
booming, with a net of about 900,000 new people—both legal and
illegal—showing up every year in America. (In 2000 alone, 770,000 people came
from Mexico.) Because of that trend line, demographers assumed that we’d be
netting roughly 1 million new immigrants every year between now and 2050.
But trends don’t always continue to the horizon, and
we’re already going in a different direction on immigration. America’s net
annual immigration numbers started declining in 2006, sliding from just over 1
million in 2005 to 855,000 in 2009. We don’t have good totals for 2010 or 2011
(because the Census Bureau rejiggered its formula in 2010, making it hard to
compare to previous years), but we do have numbers for Mexican immigration
alone, which show—amazingly—that in the most recent years there’s been a
net flow of zero immigrants from Mexico. Since Mexico has
historically made up nearly two-thirds of our Hispanic immigrant pool all by
itself, this would suggest that when we do get comparable data we will see that
there has been a significant drop in immigration already.
Economists who have noted this sudden shift are quick
to explain it as a byproduct of the recession and the bursting housing bubble,
which dried up jobs—particularly in the construction industry—causing
prospective immigrants to stay put and pushing many illegal immigrants already
in the country to head home. The implication of this argument is that as soon
as our economy goes back to “normal,” the patterns of migration will, too.
Demographers aren’t so sure. Speaking broadly, when it
comes to immigration there are two kinds of countries—sending and receiving.
The economic factors distinguishing the two are what you’d expect—rich vs.
poor; dynamic vs. lethargic. But there are demographic markers, too. Receiving
countries tend to have very low fertility rates—generally below the
replacement rate of 2.1. (That is, if the average woman has 2.1 children in her
lifetime then a country’s population will maintain a steady state.) In the
short run, fertility rates below replacement cause labor shortages. Sending
countries, on the other hand, have fertility rates well above the replacement
rate, and resultant labor surpluses.
When you look at immigration rates from Central and
South America to the United States, you find that these demographic markers are
fairly reliable. Over the last decade or so the high-fertility countries
(Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, Colombia) have sent larger numbers of
immigrants to America while below-replacement countries (Uruguay, Chile,
Brazil) have sent relatively few. Consider, for the sake of illustration, the
cases of Guatemala and Costa Rica, two tiny Central American countries. With a
population of 14 million, Guatemala still has a relatively robust fertility
rate of 3.18. And as of 2010, there were a million people of Guatemalan descent
living in the United States. Costa Rica has a population of 4.6 million and a
fertility rate of 1.92. There are only 126,000 Costa Ricans in America—about
66 percent fewer than you would expect if the Guatemalan rates prevailed.
What else happened between 2006 and today, aside from
the housing bubble and the Great Recession? Mexico’s fertility rate—which has
been heading downward on an express elevator since the 1970s—started nearing
the replacement rate. The data are slightly conflicting on how low it is—some
people believe it has already dipped below 2.1, others put the number just over
2.2. But everyone agrees that the trajectory is downward still. And that the
same is true of nearly every other country south of the American border.
So will America add another 38 million Hispanics by
2050 just through immigration alone, as the projections suggest? No one knows,
of course. But it seems an uncertain proposition. The boom days of Hispanic
immigration may already be a thing of the past.
Which leads us to the fertility rate of Hispanic
Americans. As a cohort, Hispanics have the highest fertility rate of America’s
racial groups, around 2.7. Much research has been done trying to figure out if,
and when, the Hispanic-American fertility rate will fall toward the national
average (which is closer to 2.0). Some researchers believe that by 2050, our
Hispanic fertility rate will be at replacement. Others suggest sooner. Some
scholars, looking at the data by cohort, suggest that Hispanic-American women
currently in their childbearing years will finish them close to the replacement
level. All of the research, however, indicates that in recent years the
fertility rate of Hispanic Americans has been moving downward faster than it
has for any other ethnic group.
Last week the Pew Center reported that from 2007 to
2010 America’s birth rate dropped by 8 percent. The decline was relatively
modest for native-born Americans—only a 6 percent drop. But the immigrant
birth rate dropped by 14 percent. And the birth rate for Mexican-born
immigrants dropped by 23 percent. These declines were outsized, but they fit
the larger trend. From 1990 to 2007, the Mexican-born birth rate had already
dropped by 26 percent.
None of this is meant to predict that by such and such
year there will be exactly so many Hispanic Americans. Social science has
limits, and they are even nearer than you think. But when you look at the
assumptions underlying the predictions for America’s Hispanic future, they’re
even more uncertain than usual—and in fact are already a decade or so out of
step with reality. America’s Great Hispanic Future is probably being oversold.
And possibly by quite a bit.
You don’t hear nearly as much about the rise of single
voters, despite the fact that they represent a much more significant trend.
Only a few analysts, such as Ruy Teixera, James Carville, and Stanley
Greenberg, have emphasized how important singletons were to President Obama’s
reelection. Properly understood, there is far less of a “gender” gap in
American politics than people think. Yes, President Obama won “women” by 11
points (55 percent to 44 percent). But Mitt Romney won married women by the
exact same margin. To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not
just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status.
Among nonmarried voters—people who are single and have never married, are
living with a partner, or are divorced—Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married
voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42.
Far more significant than the gender gap is the
marriage gap. And what was made clear in the 2012 election was that the cohorts
of unmarried women and men are now at historic highs—and are still
increasing. This marriage gap—and its implications for our political,
economic, and cultural future—is only dimly understood.
Americans have been wedded to marriage for a very long
time. Between 1910 and 1970, the “ever-married rate”—that is, the percentage
of people who marry at some point in their lives—went as high as 98.3 percent
and never dipped below 92.8 percent. Beginning in 1970, the ever-married number
began a gradual decline so that by 2000 it stood at 88.6 percent.
Today, the numbers are more striking: 23.8 percent of
men, and 19 percent of women, between the ages of 35 and 44 have never been
married. Tick back a cohort to the people between 20 and 34—the
prime-childbearing years—and the numbers are even more startling: 67 percent
of men and 57 percent of women in that group have never been married. When you
total it all up, over half of the voting-age population in America—and 40
percent of the people who actually showed up to vote this time around—are
single.
What does this group look like? Geographically, they
tend to live in cities. As urban density increases, marriage rates (and
childbearing rates) fall in nearly a straight line. Carville and Greenberg put
together a Venn diagram which is highly instructive. Of the 111 million single
eligible voters, 53 million are women and 58 million are men. Only 5.7 million
of these women are Hispanic and 9.7 million are African American. Nearly
three-quarters of all single women are white. In other words, the cohort looks
a lot like the Julia character the Obama campaign rolled out to show how the
president’s policies care for that plucky gal from the moment she enrolls in
Head Start right through her retirement. You may recall that because of
President Obama, Julia goes to college, gets free birth control, has a baby
anyway, sends her lone kid to public school, and then—at age 42—starts her
own business (as a web designer!). What she does not do is get married.
Singles broke decisively for Obama. Though his margins
with them were lower than they were in 2008, he still won them handily: Obama
was +16 among single men and +36 with single women. But the real news wasn’t
how singles broke—it was that their share of the total vote increased by a
whopping 6 percentage points. To put this in some perspective,
the wave of Hispanic voters we’ve heard so much about increased its share of
the total vote from 2008 to 2012 by a single point, roughly 1.27 million
voters. Meanwhile, that 6 percentage point increase meant 7.6 million more
single voters than in 2008. They provided Obama with a margin of 2.9 million
votes, about two-thirds of his margin of victory. Back in 2010, Teixera noted
that 47 percent of all women are now unmarried, up from 38 percent in 1970.
“Their current size in the voter pool—more than a quarter of eligible
voters—is nearly the size of white evangelical Protestants, who are perhaps
the GOP’s largest base group,” he writes. “And since the current growth rate of
the population of unmarried women is relatively high (double that of married
women), the proportion of unmarried women in the voting pool should continue to
increase.” In the medium run, he’s almost certainly correct.
How did we get to an America where half of the adult
population isn’t married and somewhere between 10 percent and 15 percent of the
population don’t get married for the first time until they’re approaching
retirement? It’s a complicated story involving, among other factors, the rise
of almost-universal higher education, the delay of marriage, urbanization, the
invention of no-fault divorce, the legitimization of cohabitation, the
increasing cost of raising children, and the creation of a government
entitlement system to do for the elderly childless what grown children did for
their parents through the millennia.
But all of these causes are particular. Looming
beneath them are two deep shifts. The first is the waning of religion in
American life. As Joel Kotkin notes in a recent report titled “The Rise of
Post-Familialism,” one of the commonalities between all of the major world
religions is that they elevate family and kinship to a central place in human
existence. Secularism tends toward agnosticism about the family. This
distinction has real-world consequences. Take any cohort of Americans—by
race, income, education—and then sort them by religious belief. The more
devout they are, the higher their rates of marriage and the more children they
have.
The second shift is the dismantling of the iron
triangle of sex, marriage, and childbearing. Beginning in roughly 1970, the
mastery of contraception decoupled sex from babymaking. And with that link
broken, the connections between sex and marriage—and finally between marriage
and childrearing—were severed, too.
Where is this trend line headed? In a word, higher.
There are no indicators to suggest when and where it will level off. Divorce
rates have stabilized, but rates of cohabitation have continued to rise,
leading many demographers to suspect that living together may be crowding out matrimony
as a mode of family formation. And increasing levels of education continue to
push the average age at first marriage higher.
Fertility rates play a role, too. Nearly one in five
American women now forgo having children altogether, and without babies,
marriage is less of a necessity. People’s attitudes have followed the fertility
rate. The Pew Research Center frequently surveys Americans about their thoughts
on what makes a successful marriage. Between the 1990 survey and the 2007
survey, there were big increases in the percentages of people who said that
sharing political or religious beliefs was “important to a good marriage.” In
2007, there was a 21 percent increase in people who said it was important for a
marriage that the couple have “good housing.” Thirty-seven percent fewer people
said that having children was important. The other indicator to decline in
importance from 1990 to 2007? “Faithfulness.”
As Kotkin explains, comparatively speaking, America is
still doing pretty well when it comes to singletons. In Europe, Asia, and most
advanced countries, people are running away from marriage, children, and family
life at an amazing rate. To pick just a smattering of data points from the
highlight reel: Thirty percent of German women today say that they do not
intend to have children. In Japan in 1960, 20 percent of women between 25 and
29 had never married. Today the number is more than 60 percent. Gavin
Jones of the National University of Singapore estimates that “up to a quarter
of all East Asian women will remain single by age 50, and up to a third will
remain childless.”
The question, then, is whether America will continue
following its glidepath to the destination the rest of the First World is
already nearing. Most experts believe that it will. As the Austrian demographer
Wolfgang Lutz puts it, once a society begins veering away from marriage and
childbearing, it becomes a “self-reinforcing mechanism” in which the cult of
the individual holds greater and greater allure.
What then? Culturally speaking, it’s anybody’s guess.
The more singletons we have, the more densely urban our living patterns are
likely to be. Sociologist Eric Klinenberg believes that the masses of
city-dwelling singles will sort themselves into “urban tribes,” based not on kinship,
but rather on shared interests. The hipsters, the foodies, the dog people, and
so on. Klinenberg teaches at NYU, so he would know. As a result, cities will
gradually transform from centers of economic and cultural foment into what
urban theorist Terry Nichols Clark calls “the city as entertainment machine.”
The urban tribes may be insipid, but they’re
reasonably benign. Kotkin sees larger cultural problems down the road. “[A]
society that is increasingly single and childless is likely to be more concerned
with serving current needs than addressing the future,” he writes. “We could
tilt more into a ‘now’ society, geared towards consuming or recreating today,
as opposed to nurturing and sacrificing for tomorrow.”
The economic effects are similarly unclear. On the one
hand, judging from the booming economic progress in highly single countries
such as Singapore and Taiwan, singletons can work longer hours and move more
easily for jobs. Which would make a single society good for the economy. (At
least in the short term, until the entitlement systems break because there
aren’t enough new taxpayers being born.) There is, however, an alternative
economic theory. Last summer demographers Patrick Fagan and Henry Potrykus
published a paper examining the effect of nonmarriage on the labor
participation rate. Fagan and Potrykus were able to identify a clear
statistical effect of marriage on men’s labor participation. What they found is
that without the responsibility of families to provide for, unmarried American
males have historically tended to drop out of the labor force, exacerbating
recessionary tendencies in the economy. We’ll soon find out which view is
correct.
And as for politics, the Democratic party clearly
believes that single Americans will support policies that grow the government
leviathan while rolling back the institutions that have long shaped civil
society. The Obama campaign targeted these voters by offering them Planned
Parenthood and Julia.
That the Republican party hasn’t figured out how to
court singles may partly be a function of failing to notice their rapid growth.
But before the GOP starts working on schemes to pander to singletons, it’s
worth considering an alternative path.
Rather than entering a bidding war with the Democratic
party for the votes of Julias, perhaps the GOP should try to convince them to
get married, instead. At the individual level, there’s nothing wrong with
forgoing marriage. But at scale, it is a dangerous proposition for a society.
That’s because marriage, as an institution, is helpful to all involved. Survey
after survey has shown that married people are happier, wealthier, and
healthier than their single counterparts. All of the research suggests that
having married parents dramatically improves the well-being of children, both
in their youth and later as adults.
As Robert George put it after the election, limited
government “cannot be maintained where the marriage culture collapses and
families fail to form or easily dissolve. Where these things happen, the
health, education, and welfare functions of the family will have to be
undertaken by someone, or some institution, and that will sooner or later be
the government.” Marriage is what makes the entire Western
project—liberalism, the dignity of the human person, the free market, and the
limited, democratic state—possible. George continues, “The two greatest
institutions ever devised for lifting people out of poverty and enabling them
to live in dignity are the market economy and the institution of marriage.
These institutions will, in the end, stand or fall together.”
Instead of trying to bribe single America
into voting Republican, Republicans might do better by making the argument—to
all Americans—that marriage is a pillar of both freedom and liberalism. That
it is an arrangement which ought to be celebrated, nurtured, and defended
because its health is integral to the success of our grand national experiment.
And that Julia and her boyfriend ought to go ahead and tie the knot.
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