After years of speculation, estimates and projections, the Census Bureau has made it official: White births are no longer a majority in the United States

Non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6% of all births in the 12-month period that ended in July 2011, according to Census Bureau data, while minorities — including Hispanics, blacks, Asians and those of mixed race — reached 50.4%, representing a majority for the first time in the country’s history. Such a turn has been long expected, but no one was certain when the moment would arrive — signaling a milestone for a nation whose government was founded by white Europeans. While over all, whites will remain a majority for some time, the fact that a younger generation is being born in which minorities are the majority has broad implications for the country’s economy, its political life and its identity. “This is an important tipping point,” said William H. Frey, the senior demographer at the Brookings Institution, describing the shift as a transformation from a mostly white baby boomer culture to the more globalized multi-ethnic country that we are becoming. Signs that the country is evolving this way start with the Oval Office, and have swept hundreds of counties in recent years, with 348 in which whites are no longer in the majority. That number doubles when it comes to the toddler population, Frey said. Whites are no longer the majority in four states and the District of Columbia, and have slipped below half in many major metro areas, including New York, Las Vegas and Memphis. The trend toward greater minority births has been building for years, the result of the large wave of immigration here over the past three decades. Hispanics make up the majority of immigrants, and they tend to be younger — and to have more children — than non-Hispanic whites. (Of the total births in the year that ended in July 2011, about 26% were Hispanic, about 15% black, and about 4% Asian.) Whites still represent the single largest share of all births, at 49.6%, and are a majority in the population as a whole, at 63.4%. But they are aging, causing a tectonic shift in American demographics. The median age for non-Hispanic whites is 42 — meaning the bulk of women are moving out of their prime childbearing years. Latinos, on the other hand, are squarely within their peak fertility, with a median age of 27, said Jeffrey Passel, senior demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center. Between 2000 and 2010, there were more Hispanic births in the United States than there were arriving Hispanic immigrants. The result is striking: Minorities accounted for 92% of the nation’s population growth in the decade that ended in 2010. The change is playing out across states with large differences in ethnic and racial makeup between the elderly and the young. Some of the largest gaps are in Arizona, Nevada, Texas and California, states that have had flare-ups over immigration, school textbooks and priorities in spending. The non-rural county with the largest gap is Yuma County, Arizona, where just 18% of people under 20 are white, compared with 73% of people over 65. Perhaps the most urgent aspect of the change is education. A college degree has become the most important building block of success in today’s economy, but blacks and Latinos lag far behind whites in getting one. According to Frey, just 13% of Hispanics and 18% of blacks have a college degree, compared with 31% of whites.