Guess what? The same trends we saw ten years ago are still trending.
Texas’ Hispanic population has grown by more than 2 million since 2010, according to new population estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau, and the state’s demographer now predicts that Hispanics will be the state’s largest population group by mid-2021.
An annual gain of 201,675 between July 2018 and July 2019 pushed the count of Hispanic residents to more than 11.5 million, the census estimates show. Although annual growth has slowed slightly in recent years, the new figures put a sharp point on how quickly the Hispanic population continues to climb. The annual growth in Hispanic residents has outpaced the combined growth among white, Black and Asian residents every year since 2010.
Texas still has a bigger white population — up to 11.95 million last year — but it grew by just 36,440 last year and by about half a million since 2010. White population growth has been so sluggish this decade that the increase in the number of Asian Texans, who make up a small share of the total population, has almost caught up with the increase in white Texans.
The latest estimates could be the last to come in before lawmakers embark on redrawing the state’s congressional and legislative maps in 2021 to account for population growth — a fraught exercise that has previously led to drawn-out litigation over claims that new maps discriminate against voters of color who are behind the state’s growth. During the last redistricting cycle, Hispanics accounted for about 65% of that growth. With a year of growth left to be accounted for, their share of Texas’ population increase since 2010 is at nearly 54%.
The story included this table of population growth figures:
Race 2010 pop 2019 est Increase
==========================================
Hispanic 9,460,921 11,525,578 2,064,657
Black 2,899,884 3,501,610 601,726
White 11,428,638 11,950,774 522,136
Asian 960,543 1,457,549 497,006
There must be a collection of people who don’t fall into any of these categories, because if I do the math on the Increase totals, “Hispanic” represents 56% of it, not 54%. White population growth is all of 14% of the total. This is very much in line with where we were in 2010. Now of course, these numbers are estimates, and the collection of the official Census data has been greatly hampered by the pandemic as well as the Trump administration’s relentless hostility towards immigrants, which included the now-defunct effort to put a citizenship question on the form. If the data we get next year differs radically from these figures, we’ll know why.
The headline reason for Census data is of course redistricting. Texas expects to get another three seats in Congress in 2021, though that could be affected by an undercount. Be that as it may, this is a good place to remind you to listen to my interview with Michael Li about the redistricting lawsuits from the past decade. I will have a new interview for you on the topic of redistricting for Monday, with Rep. Marc Veasey, who was one of the plaintiffs in that litigation.