White American - Demographic Information

Demographic Information

Whites (non-Hispanic and Hispanic) made up 79.8% or 75% of the American population in 2008. This latter number is sometimes recorded as 77.1% when it includes about 2% of the population who are identified as white in combination with one or more other races. The largest ethnic groups (by ancestry) among white Americans were Germans, followed by the Irish and the English. It is likely that many Americans who are descended of English, Scotch-Irish, or Scottish peoples, or perhaps even more commonly a combination of these and of these and other ethnic groups, simply identify as "American" in the census, and that Americans of English descent are far greater in number than those of German descent. For a better idea on why Americans of English ancestry are likely far undercounted, see English American. In the 1980 census 49,598,035 Americans cited that they were of English ancestry, making them 26% of the country and the largest group at the time, and in fact larger than the population of England itself. Slightly more than half of these people would cite that they were of "American" ancestry on subsequent censuses and virtually everywhere that "American" ancestry predominates on the 2000 census corresponds to places where "English" predominated on the 1980 census.

White Americans (again, non-Hispanic and Hispanic Whites) are projected to remain the majority, though with their percentage decreasing to 72% of the total population by 2050. However, the projections are that the non-Hispanic White population will become less than 50% of the population by 2042,Template:Http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/05/17/explaining-why-minority-births-now-outnumber-white-births/ in part because Non-Hispanic Whites have the lowest fertility rate of any major racial group in the United States and largely due to mass-immigration.Template:Http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2012/05/17/explaining-why-minority-births-now-outnumber-white-births/

While over ten million white people can trace part of their ancestry back to the Pilgrims who arrived on the Mayflower in 1620 (this common statistic overlooks the Jamestown, Virginia foundations of America and roots of even earlier colonist-descended Americans, such as Spanish Americans in St. Augustine, Florida), over 35 million whites have at least one ancestor who passed through the Ellis Island immigration station, which processed arriving immigrants from 1892 until 1954. See also: European Americans.