2050: Year of the Minority Majority

According to Tanvi Misra of CityLab, by 2050 Brookings Institution demographer William Frey has found that "[t]he share of so-called 'new minorities'—Hispanics, Asians and multi-racial groups in America—is going to double. If your first guess is that this is all due to immigration, you're not entirely wrong—it's because of past immigration. What's really driving the growth now (and will continue to do so in the future) is that majority of the immigrants who are already here are at the baby-making age."

Frey discusses the spatial locations of these minority groups within metropolitan areas. When discussing suburban and urban migration, Frey believes, "More Asian metropolitan residents live in the suburbs than in the cities than two decades ago. Eventually, more Hispanics moved into the suburbs. Now, with the 2010 Census, there are more blacks moving to the suburbs... which is a real milestone in the U.S. given the strong city-concentration of blacks for many, many, many decades. This younger generation of African-Americans—professionals and graduates—are moving off to the suburbs just like younger people have... in other race groups."

Overall, Frey sees the implications of the demographic reshuffling as positive. The implications of these changes are seen in the proliferation of interracial marriages and the politics of places. However, these implications "move at different paces in different parts of the country—but it is a moving out and an integration—not only across regions, cities and suburbs, but at the neighborhood level."