Pew Research Center

Interracial marriage: Who is most likely to ‘marry out,’ and where

Photo by WolfS♡ul/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A popular Q&A on this site last year explored who is more or less likely to marry outside their own racial or ethnic group, why, and where in the U.S. they are more likely to do it. Now, the Pew Research Center has further distilled the data on multicultural love.

The new Pew report charts the rise of interracial marriage, with the share of new marriages between spouses of different races or ethnicities having gone up to 15.1 % in 2010. The overall share of existing interracial or inter-ethnic marriages stands at 8.4 percent, an all-time high. It’s a far cry from 1980, when only 3 percent of all marriages and less than 7 percent of new ones involved partners of different racial or ethnic groups.

Why the difference? Changing demographics play a part, but in its summary, Pew attributes the trend in part also to changing attitudes, with more than four in ten Americans saying that “more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while only about one-in-ten think it is a change for the worse.” Now for the details:

Who marries out most: Likeliest to “marry out” were Asian Americans at 28 percent, followed by Latinos at 26 percent. Black Americans, a group that used to marry out less, followed at 17 percent. Non-Latino whites were still the least likely to marry out, with only 9 percent saying “I do” to someone from another group. (An important note: “White” in this report refers to non-Latino whites, as Hispanic/Latino is an ethnic category on census forms, not a racial one. )

In some groups, who marries out most depends on gender: Black men are much more likely to marry out than black women, and Asian women are much more likely to marry out than Asian men. There’s not as much of a gender difference among white and Latino newlyweds who marry outside their group.

White/Asian newlywed couples have more money: Between 2008 and 2010, white/Asian newlyweds had higher median combined annual earnings ($70,952) than other couples, including more than couples in which both partners are white or both are Asian. Who had the most money of these? Couples in which the husband is Asian and the wife is white. Furthermore, more whites who married Asians had college degrees than whites who married whites.

And now the not-so-great news: A piece of data that stings for the implications it carries is that Latino and black newlyweds who marry whites have greater educational attainment. Furthermore, there’s a gender/earnings gap when it comes to whites who marry out. White male newlyweds who marry Asian, Latina or black spouses tend to earn more than white male newlyweds who marry a white spouse. But white female newlyweds who marry a Latino or black spouse (unlike those who marry an Asian spouse) tend to earn less. Another piece of bad news: Overall, blended couples are more likely to divorce, although the stats vary.

For mixed marriages, the West is the best: About one in five newlyweds (22 percent) in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010. This is much higher than anywhere else, including the South (14 percent), the Northeast (13 percent) and the Midwest (11 percent). The state with the most mixed race/ethnicity marriages? Hawaii, where these accounted for 42 percent of new marriages between 2008 and 2010.

Here’s part of the explanation that Andrew Beveridge, the sociologist interviewed in last year’s Q&A (and whose work was illustrated in an excellent “Who is marrying whom” graphic in the New York Times) had for the regional differences:

The New York Times was running around Alabama (before the 2008 election) talking to people, and they asked this guy, “Wouldn’t you be more likely to vote for Obama because he is partly white?” But he said no, because “that is the mark.” He believed that is the mark of the devil.

So you may have a situation where you have areas like New York or Los Angeles, where people are less into being whatever, and then you’ve got areas (where it’s not like this). These places don’t have intermarriage, so you’ll have people leaving there. If you’re in Oklahoma and you’re gay, you’ll go to New York or San Francisco or L.A. You’ll migrate.

The entire Pew Research report can be downloaded here.

FILED UNDER: Interracial marriage, Pew Research Center

October 4, 2011 | 3:36 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The multi-generational household is back, led by Asian and Latino families

Source: Pew Research Center

What is a multi-generational household? It’s when Abuela lives upstairs and helps take care of the kids, or when your parents take your unemployed brother back in, or any combination involving two or more adult generations under one roof. Or sometimes it’s a skipped-generation household, with grandparents raising a grandchild.

And these households are on the rise, with Latinos and Asians topping the list of those most likely to do it. That in itself is not a bad thing, as generations living together is a tradition that many immigrant families are at least relatively comfortable with. The reasons behind the spike? Not so comfortable. According to a report from the Pew Research Center, the growth in the number of multi-generational U.S. households in recent years coincides with the Great Recession.

As people tightened their belts and coped with layoffs and foreclosures, the number of Americans living in multi-generational households grew more than five times as sharply as the overall population increased between 2007 to 2009, the years that spanned the Great Recession (which officially ended in 2009, though one wouldn’t know it). The biggest jump was among adults ages 25 to 34 who live with their parents, according to the report.

A record 51.4 million Americans lived in a multi-generational household in 2009. Of those, 23 percent were Latino, the group that saw the biggest jump in multi-generational living (up 17.6 percent in just two years), not surprising as Latinos were group the hardest hit by the recession. Another 26 percent were Asian. From the report:

From 2007 to 2009, the sharpest growth in the multi-generational household population was among Hispanics (17.6%) and Americans of two or more races (24.4%).

The black population in these households grew by 8.7% from 2007 to 2009, the non-Hispanic white population by 8.5% and the Asian population by 7.3%.

In all cases, this growth was more rapid than the overall population increase during this period, which was 6.5% for Hispanics, 14.7% for mixed-race Americans (that is, of two or more races), 1.5% for blacks, 0.4% for whites and 3.8% for Asians.

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FILED UNDER: Multi-generational, Multi-generational households, Pew Research Center

July 26, 2011 | 4:33 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Latinos hit worst as minority vs. white wealth gap reaches record

Source: Pew Research Center

A report highlighted in an earlier post today questioned the long-term upward mobility of immigrants in the United States, in light of the recession and a predicted slow recovery. And at least as far as Latinos are concerned, the numbers in another new report seem to bear out the economic beating some have taken.

According to the Pew Research Center, Latinos’ median household wealth plummeted between 2005 and 2009. From the summary:

Median household wealth among Hispanics fell from $18,359 in 2005 to $6,325 in 2009. The percentage drop—66%—was the largest among all racial and ethnic groups, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Social & Demographic Trends project. During the same period, median household wealth declined 53% among black households and 16% among white households.

In a nutshell, the recession has widened the wealth gap between whites and minorities to a record level.The analysis found the median wealth of white households to be 18 times that of Latino households, and 20 times that of black households. The report reads:

These lopsided wealth ratios are the largest in the quarter century since the government first published such data, and roughly twice the size of the ratios that had prevailed between these three groups for the two decades prior to the Great Recession.

Partly to blame is the housing market crisis, as Latinos derived nearly two-thirds of their net worth from home equity before the downturn and “a disproportionate share reside in states that were in the vanguard of the housing meltdown.” Homeowners in California, Florida, Nevada and Arizona were hit particularly hard.

The entire report can be viewed here.

FILED UNDER: Economy, Latino homeowners, Pew Hispanic Center, Pew Research Center, Wealth gap

May 12, 2011 | 10:58 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Report: U.S. population growth almost exclusively minority-driven

Art by Eric Fischer/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A color-coded ethnicity map of the L.A. area

We already know that Latinos accounted for more than half the nation’s population growth in the last decade.

Today the Pew Research Center broadened the minority growth picture in its Daily Number feature, distilling this nugget from the 2010 Census: The U.S. population growth between 2000 and 2010 was driven almost exclusively by racial and ethnic minorities.

From the post:

Overall, racial and ethnic minorities accounted for 91.7% of the nation’s population growth over the past 10 years.

The non-Hispanic white population has accounted for only the remaining 8.3% of the nation’s growth. Hispanics were responsible for 56% of the nation’s population growth over the past decade. There are now 50.5 million Latinos living in the U.S. according to the 2010 Census, up from 35.3 million in 2000, making Latinos the nation’s largest minority group and 16.3% of the total population. There are 196.8 million whites in the U.S. (accounting for 63.7% of the total population), 37.7 million blacks (12.2%) and 14.5 million Asians (4.7%). Six million non-Hispanics, or 1.9% of the U.S. population, checked more than one race.

An accompanying chart breaks down the 2010 vs. 2000 population for all of these groups, including those identifying as “two or more races.”

Census numbers released earlier this year showed that the United States is on course to become a majority-minority nation, with non-white minority children accounting for 48.6 percent of the children born in this country between July 2008 and July 2009, an increase from just two years earlier.

FILED UNDER: Culture/Identity, 2010 Census, Pew Research Center

March 9, 2011 | 11:14 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

American Muslims: Understanding a little-understood minority

Photo by HORIZON/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The interior of a mosque in Ishafan, Iran, May 2006

Source: Pew Research Center

Screen shot from “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream”

Tomorrow’s Congressional hearing on the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism is likely to be remembered as a key moment defining racial and ethnic relations in the United States in the post-9/11 era. New York’s Rep. Peter King, the Republican chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, has defended the hearing as “absolutely essential;” American Muslims, along with other immigrant groups and civil rights advocates, have condemned it as government-sanctioned xenophobia.

At the heart of the conversation are American Muslims, perhaps the nation’s least-understood minority. Here are a few details about a segment of the U.S. population that numbers more than 2 million:

A Pew Research Center study from 2007 identified American Muslims as “mostly middle class and mainstream.” While predominantly immigrants, the study found them to be generally more integrated into American society and culture and more affluent than their immigrant counterparts in Europe.

From the report:

The survey shows that although many Muslims are relative newcomers to the U.S., they are highly assimilated into American society. On balance, they believe that Muslims coming to the U.S. should try and adopt American customs, rather than trying to remain distinct from the larger society. And by nearly two-to-one (63%-32%) Muslim Americans do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society.

The report estimated a total U.S. Muslim population of roughly 2.35 million at the time, 65 percent foreign-born and 35 percent native-born, with more than half of the latter non-immigrant African Americans. The study also found that while there were some exceptions, “absolute levels of support for Islamic extremism among Muslim Americans are quite low, especially when compared with Muslims around the world.”

The role of mosques will come up in the hearing, and there’s a recent study that connects mosque involvement among American Muslims with civic involvement.

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