United States of America - Demographics

As of August 2006, there are an estimated 299,059,138 people in the United States, with a population growth rate of about 0.59%. According to Census 2000, about 79% of the population lives in urban areas, and the country has 31 ethnic groups with at least one million members each, with numerous others represented in smaller amounts. In terms of wealth distribution, thirty-five million Americans live in poverty, about 12.6% of the population; twenty percent of the population possesses 80% of the nation's wealth.

The majority of Americans (80.4% in 2004) are the descendants of white immigrants; people of solely non-Hispanic white ancestry were 67.4% of the population. The non-Hispanic white population is proportionally declining, both due to immigration from nonwhite countries and due to a higher birth rate among ethnic and racial minorities. If current immigration trends continue, the number of non-Hispanic whites is expected to be reduced to a plurality by 2040-2050. The largest ethnic group of European ancestry is German at 15.2%, followed by Irish (10.8%), English (8.7%), Italian (5.6%) and Scandinavian (3.7%). Many immigrants also hail from Slavic countries, such as Poland and Russia, as well as from French Canada. African Americans, or Blacks, largely descend from Africans who arrived as slaves during the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and number about 35 million or 12.9% of the population. At about 1.5% of the total population, Native Americans and Alaska Natives number about 4.4 million, approximately 35% of whom were living on reservations in 2005.

Current demographic trends include the immigration of Hispanics from Latin America into the Southwest, a region that is home to about 60% of the 35 million Hispanics in the United States. Immigrants from Mexico make up about 66% of the Hispanic community, and are second only to the German-descent population in the single-ethnicity category. The Hispanic population, which has been growing at an annual rate of about 4.46% since the 1990s, is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades, because of both immigration and a higher birth rate among Latinos than among the general population. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, the population of the United States will reach 300 million people in October 2006.

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