Mexican Border

I recently read a review of Robert Kaplan's book "The Revenge of Geography" wherein he writes about how geography shapes society. One part of interest to me, but won't expand on in this post is the importance of Ukraine to Russia in whether or not Russia takes a more European or Asian orientation. What I want to talk about here is actually a quote from another book about the Mexican border. The reviewer critiques Kaplan on his views about the Mexican border and quotes another author, George Friedman who wrote "[Mexico's] real, social border will be hundreds of miles north of the legal border.” I thought this was an interesting concept. In terms of geography, the Mexican border is pretty poorly defined and was established at a time when the region was sparsely populated. So here lies a poorly defined border seperating two countries with a massive income gap. This of course leads to massive immigration. Because of the level of immigration and the proximity of Mexico, Mexicans are not being assimilated in the same way immigrants in the past were. They have such a large presence that they are about to maintain their culture and language and current technology allows them to communicate and visit with family in Mexico regularly, so they are never alienated from their history. This means that the Southwest is increasingly looking like its southern neighbors, so while the Mexican border may be south of Texas, Mexican society extends farther north.

In looking at this issue, I wanted to know just how far north Hispanic culture extends today. To do this, I looked at Census data on the Hispanic population just north of the Mexican border. I then used this data to map out a region of the US where the population is 50% Hispanic.

There are counties north of this region which are over 50% Hispanic, but I wanted to create as clean a border as possible without exclaves. Likewise, the region includes counties with very low Hispanic populations, but were surrounded by counties with high Hispanic populations. I left one American exclave though, San Diego and Orange County, because it has a large population, but a relative small Hispanic population.

Overall, this region represents 36 million people, 18 million of whom are Hispanic. New Mexico is clearly the most Hispanic state, although it is sparsely populated so the majority of this region lives in California. Over a quarter of the population is in Los Angeles County alone.

What is striking about this region is how uneven it is. It extends as far north as the Bay Area in California and parts of Colorado and Kansas, but only incorporates the border counties of Arizona and just barely reaches Austin and Houston. Arizona has a relatively low Hispanic population despite being flanked by large Hispanic populations in California and New Mexico. The Hispanic population isn't moving uniformly northward but is following its own patterns, possibly adhering to more sensible boundaries than the arbitrary ones currently in place.

Majority-Minority 2011

It's been awhile since I've looked at figures for the majority-minority states. In my last post on the subject, new data from the 2010 census revealed that minority populations had been under counted, and that the estimated year for when most states would become majority-minority states moved forward considerably. Well, I finally got around to including 2011 in my estimates. Not much has changed from 2010, the next ten states likely to become majority-minority states, remain the same, although the years change a little.

Nevada - 2014
Maryland - 2017
Georgia - 2019
Florida - 2022
New Jersey - 2025
Arizona - 2025
New York - 2029
Louisiana - 2030 (est. excludes 2005)
Mississippi - 2030
Delaware - 2031

Only three states, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, showed a proportional increase in the white population between 2010 and 2011, but in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, it wasn't large enough to reverse the trend, and in Hawaii, the white population is already so small, there is no significant trend. DC is the only region that clearly shows a reversal as the city becomes more gentrified. According to current trends, DC will be majority white by 2029. However, I'm skeptical this trend will continue as the pace of change decreased greatly between 2010 and 2011.