Whites No Longer the Majority in Texas

The survey said whites stopped being the majority as of last year. The bureau also released statistics that showed Texas joined only Illinois and North Carolina in having a poverty rate that measurably increased while income decreased in 2002-03.

State demographer Steve Murdock said the two trends are related as economic woes have slowed white migration from other states. Most of Texas' population expansion since 2000 has come from births and international immigration, both sources of predominantly Hispanic growth.

"A variety of historical and discriminatory factors mean (Hispanics) have lower incomes," Murdock said.

Texas was dominated by Indians and a few Spanish settlers until 1821, when the new Mexican government allowed Americans to enter as long as they pledged allegiance, turned Catholic and learned Spanish.

Soon the flood of white newcomers quickly made Texas look like other U.S. frontier areas, and dictator Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna's attempt to tighten Mexican control resulted in a successful Texas revolution in 1836. By the time Texas became a state in 1845, whites dominated the landscape.

That ended some time in 2004, according to estimates from the annual population measurement known as the American Community Survey.

Estimates show Texas was 49.5 percent white in 2004, down 1.5 percentage points from 2002 but still a large plurality. Almost all the loss was made up by Hispanics, who made up about 35.3 percent of the populace.

"The future of Latinos is the future of Texas, as the population numbers show," said Luis Figueroa, legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.

The black population remained basically flat at around 10.8 percent. Asian-Americans now accounted for about 3 percent of Texas.

The dip of whites below the 50 percent mark was inevitable, although its occurrence in 2004 was at the early end of the predicted scale, Murdock said.

"We thought it probably would happen this year or next, so it's only a year different," Murdock said. "It does indicate that Hispanic growth is occurring more rapidly than we anticipated it would."

Murdock said Texas' continued explosion in Hispanic growth, fueled largely by international immigration that made up 36 percent of the state's growth from April 2000 to July 2004, helps explain the socio-economic numbers.

Most states did not report a significant change in income or poverty from 2001-02 to 2002-03, according to the Census Bureau. Not Texas, which had an estimated 3.8 percent decline in median household income to about $41,000 along with a 1 percent hike in the poverty rate.

The Census Bureau's definition of poverty varies by the size of the household.

There was little change in the percentage of Texans without health insurance, which was basically flat at 24.7 percent. But with nearly a quarter of its residents uninsured, Texas still easily leads the nation in that unwanted statistic.

Figueroa pointed to a recent report that immigrant teens with sterling academic records are having trouble getting into college because of a lack of citizenship.

"If you keep putting up barriers to obtaining success, a lot of times the result is going to be a cycle of no insurance and lower incomes," he said from his San Antonio office.

Not all the numbers paint such a grim socio-economic picture for Texas. The percentage of Texans at least 25 years old with a high school diploma grew slightly to 77.8 percent while those with college degrees was flat at 24.5 percent.

However, the rate of Texas adults who didn't even make it to high school also rose slightly, to 10.8 percent.