The US Census Bureau said Thursday that the United States is becoming more diverse faster than expected as minority communities grow while the white population shrinks for the first time.

The bureau released a new set of data from last year's decimal census.

This data, which will be used to redraw political boundaries and manage hundreds of billions of dollars in federal, state and local programs over the next decade, sheds new light on the population that is growing more slowly and the number of those growing more dramatically than expected.

The following are 5 observations contained in a

report

published by the American "The Hill" website:

The white population is declining

There are fewer white Americans today than when the 2010 census was taken. Today, the white population makes up about 57.8% of the population, the first time that their percentage has fallen below 60%.

Whites have made up a progressively smaller percentage of the population at nearly every census since the first census was taken in 1790, but the initial white population has never declined in any previous period.

Demographers say there are several reasons behind this decline, including that white women are delaying having children until later in life and are having fewer children than their predecessors in previous generations, and the opioid epidemic is having a real impact on white children.

Each state is becoming more diverse

In the past decade, the proportion of whites in the population has declined in all 50 states.

Washington state has seen its white population shrink by the largest margin of any state, down 8.7% over the past decade.

Massachusetts, Nevada and Connecticut saw declines of more than 8% as they became more diversified.


Six states have fewer whites than non-white minorities: Hawaii, California, New Mexico, Texas, Nevada, and Maryland.

States with a white majority population are becoming more diverse.

In the past decade, only 4 states - New Hampshire, West Virginia, Vermont and Maine - were more than 90% white.

Now, only Maine has a white population above 90%.

In Washington, DC, whites now lag behind black Americans by 2%.

Most minorities grow naturally

The number of Hispanic Americans has grown to 62 million, an increase of 12 million over the past decade.

The number of black Americans rose nearly 2 million, and the number of Asian Americans grew more rapidly than any other race.

Population growth slows down dramatically

The US population has grown by 22.7 million in the past decade, to 331,449,281 today, an increase of just over 7% and the second-slowest growth rate ever measured by a decimal census.

It was only in the 1930s, the years after the Great Depression, that the rate of growth was slower.

Although the state is not in danger of losing the population in general, the growing number of older Americans and the shrinking size of the average family carry the potential for economic problems in the future: There will be fewer people in the workforce who support more retirees.

suburban growth

Population increases were greater in suburban areas and less in remote rural areas. The suburbs have seen a natural increase and increases in immigration from both internally displaced people and immigrants from abroad.