In 30 years?

America: This Is Your Future

What's the country really going to look like in 30 years? Get ready for older, more diverse, and new tensions about who gets what.

By Dana Goldstein

Barack Obama roared onto the political stage in 2004 with a speech many Americans found soothing. "There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America,” he said. “There’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states. … We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”

Twelve years later, the Obama era is ending with a lesson—taught by Donald Trump—in how deep political divisions of race and geography remain. The electoral map that emerged on Nov. 8 looked like a sea of red speckled with islands of blue. Hillary Clinton won the cities and close-in suburbs where affluent professionals, millennials and people of color are clustered. Donald Trump prevailed in the farther-flung suburban, exurban and rural places where residents are disproportionately white and aging.

It will take a long time to fully understand why this election turned out the way it did. But part of it, undeniably, has to do with anxiety about how America is changing. Some voters idealized a picture they grew up with, in which culture and politics were dominated by a white Christian majority. They found a voice for their disorientation in Trump’s rhetoric and his promises that he could restore an older vision of the country.

Demographic change, however, is not a force that is easy to halt — and as American leaders and policymakers grapple with the country’s real challenges and political trajectory, it’s the actual face of Future America they’ll need to deal with, not an imagined one. It might sound unknowable, a kind of crystal-ball exercise with numbers, but in many ways the picture is already becoming clear. The big trend lines in our population are powerful and hard to budge. The next official snapshot will arrive in the form of the 2020 Census, which experts project will show an America becoming slightly less white and more diverse: white Americans will likely make up 2 percent less of the population than they did in 2015, while Hispanic Americans will make up 1.5 percent more. Asian Americans, foreign-born Americans, and those who identify as multiracial will all make up a larger share of the country, while the black population will hold steady.

What happens after that? We decided to find out, sketching a picture of the nation by talking to a range of demographers who specialize in tracking and analyzing American population shifts. They are experts on race, immigration, aging, changing family structures and urban planning, along with how all these factors affect electoral politics. They emphasized that demographics aren't destiny. No political party can count on perpetual support from any particular demographic group. But the big changes they study will shape the issues we'll be debating for decades to come. By examining their research, it’s possible to envision the potential America of 2050 right now.

That nation will have gone through two big shifts: It will likely be browner and more polyglot than the America of 2016, and it will also be much older. Though those two trends both pose major policy challenges, they’re also interlinked; as the country ages, it will depend on the productivity of a shrinking number of young people to support its retired and elderly population, and those young people will be much less white.

Census projections show that by the census of 2050, the United States will no longer have a clear white majority—at least as we define “white” today. Fifty-three percent of the population will be multiracial or nonwhite, compared with less than 40 percent currently. Because the growth of the nonwhite population is driven more by fertility than by immigration, researchers believe this racial shift will occur even if the federal government enacts new immigration restrictions. “If you reduced new immigration to zero, you’d still see growth in immigrant communities, more so than in white, native-born communities,” said Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute. “Immigrants just have more children and have them younger.”

Most of these new Americans will have roots in Latin America, Asia and Africa. Although the Trump administration is setting itself up to crack down on undocumented immigration, anti-immigrant sentiment tends not to depress legal immigration—as long as jobs remain available. Research from states that passed recent laws targeting undocumented people, like Arizona and Georgia, finds the laws had no significant real-world effect on the number of immigrants living in a state. (It’s possible Trump could go after legal immigration as well, by reducing the number of visas granted to workers with special skills and to those with family members already living in the United States. But that would create a fight with the business community, which relies on access to legal immigrant labor at all levels.)

Alongside these ethnic and racial changes, the growth in the population over 85, those most likely to be ill or disabled, will be especially stark. Currently, there are approximately 33 working adults for each American 85 and up; by 2050, that ratio will fall to 13 workers per American over 85.

What all of this means for politics depends on factors that are more difficult to predict — and on battles that might be fought in unfamiliar places. With rapidly diversifying populations, the swing states of the future may be Oklahoma, Georgia and Texas, rather than Ohio or Pennsylvania, which will, even in 2050, remain majority white. It’s not at all clear who, in the future, will consider themselves white, or whether regional segregation by education and wealth, which has become more acute in recent years, will deepen or ease. Will the cities that have recently exploded in population, mostly in the Sun Belt, remain economically vibrant, or will new growth cities emerge, in other parts of the country? How will climate change impact where and how people live?

Many of those questions are unanswerable for now; they depend on the course of policies not yet formulated. But when it comes to the face of Future America, there are places where the likely demographics of 2050 – and the conflicts it’s likely to bring – are already coming into focus. Below, we take a look at three of them: the expansive metropolis of Houston, Texas; the aging rural areas of North Carolina; and Detroit, where a neighborhood called BanglaTown is being revived not by white gentrifiers, but by South Asian immigrants. These regions offer hope for a newer America that works smoothly, showing that diversity can drive economic growth. But they also offer cautionary tales about just how hard it may be to craft a shared American identity in an increasingly multicultural country.

Stephen Klineberg gets excited when he talks about Houston. “Wherever you go, you think you’re on the edge of town. Then—all of a sudden!—there’s a new patchwork of civilization,” he said. Klineberg is a sociologist and the founding director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University. Like lots of other Houstonians, he is a transplant from the Northeast. He has spent the past three decades tracking the economic and demographic transformation of his adopted home.

Houston’s wide-open spaces, surrounded by oil fields, have helped make it America’s boomtown. With 6.5 million residents, it is the nation’s fastest growing metropolitan region; a sprawling, flat, dry metropolis whose ethnic diversity reflects what America will most likely look like in 2050 and beyond. There is no racial majority in the Houston metro area. Forty-two percent of Harris County residents are Hispanic; 31 percent are non-Hispanic white; 20 percent are black; and 7 percent are Asian. Between 2000 and 2015, the Hispanic, black, and Asian share of the population grew, while the proportion of whites shrank.

“All of America will look like Houston looks today in 25 years,” Klineberg said. “Houston is one of the cities where the American future is going to be worked out.”

Houston is becoming more Democratic, if not as uniformly progressive as the nation’s older big cities, like New York and Chicago. Eight years ago, Barack Obama became the first Democratic presidential nominee to win Harris County in over four decades, by just 2 points. In 2016, Hillary Clinton bested Donald Trump in Houston by 12 points. According to a survey of Houstonians conducted by Klineberg and colleagues, only about 20 percent of area residents believe undocumented immigration is a major problem, down from 50 percent in 2000. Feelings about the poor and Muslim-Americans seem to be more complicated. Fifty-seven percent believe that welfare recipients are “taking advantage of the system.” Half of survey respondents expressed negative views on Islam.