By Michael Barone
While the more euphonious “Latinos” is heard often in California and sometimes in Texas, the Census Bureau prefers the clumsy word “Hispanics” to describe them—the people descended from the European colonists, American Indians, and African slaves in Spain’s former possessions in the New World.
And there are today twenty-nine million of them in the United States, more than one in ten people. Soon there will be more Latinos than blacks. Of Americans over thirty-five, 7 percent are Hispanic; of those under thirty-five, 13 percent are. Given continuing high rates of immigration and intermarriage, it is likely that within fifty years more than one in five people in the United States will be of Latino descent.
Obviously they will do much to shape America in the twenty-first century. Yet most Americans know little about America’s Hispanics, and much they think they know is wrong. Nor do the experts always get things right—which should not be surprising, for the rush of Latinos since the Immigration Act of 1965 was almost entirely unpredicted. Read full article here at the hoover.org
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