USA—A Multicultural Society, a Mission Field
Dr. Roberto Hodgson, Mission Director for Hispanic Ministries

In recent decades, the U.S. and Canada has become a fertile multicultural mission field. According to Census Bureau estimates released in March, the U.S. foreign-born population has reached a record high of 32.5 million foreign-born residents, 2 percent more than the 31.8 million recorded a year ago.

In a population of 282.1 million, the foreign born amounted to 11.5 percent. The growth rate tripled between March 2000 and 2001. Nearly 17 million people, or just over half of the foreign-born population in 2002, came from Latin America. Over half of the 17 million arrived after 1990. About 2.4 million people arrived in the country in 2001 according to demographer William Frey.

Joel Kotkin and Thomas Tseng in Happy To Mix It All Up write the following: "Today's young Americans represent the most multiracial group in modern American history. According to Census 2000, 40 percent of people under the age of 25—"echo boomers" and younger—belong to some race or ethnic category other than "non-Hispanic white." Overall, during the 1990s, immigrants and their children were responsible for a remarkable 70 percent of total U.S. population growth.

The kind of culture these new Americans are shaping is most evident in cities such as New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami and Houston—where immigrants, and, more importantly, their offspring, are molding street-side realities. Roughly 30 percent of second-generation Latinos and Asians now wed people from outside their own racial groups. Mixed-race births in California have grown from 40,000 in 1980 to more than 70,000 annually; one out of every seven babies born in the Golden State in 1997 had parents of different races. This unprecedented mixing alone guarantees the development of an increasingly blended culture, not only for Latinos and Asians in particular, but for young Americans as a whole.

The post-ethnic reality is also expressed in how people of different ethnicities increasingly live and, yes, shop in America. A generation ago, Americans were warned about becoming a country bifurcated between inner-city minorities and suburban whites. But this is no longer a danger. Today, nearly 51 percent of Asians, 43 percent of Latinos, and 32 percent of African Americans live in the suburbs. The immediate suburbs around Denver, for example, experienced a 50 percent increase in their Latino populations during the 1990s."