The Changing Face of America

Diversity in the US 2024

The United States are what they are because of immigration: Is it still an attractive country? How does it impact Americans' sense of self? How is the US of 2022 including its minorities?

We'll see that people's looks, people's language, and more profoundly people's identities are changed or are changing... How are people identifying? Are people free to explore their identities? What is happening to race in America?

We will first have a look at the evolution of society and the 'new portrait' of America, already announced in this special issue of Time magazine THIRTY years ago (FALL 1993), then listen to students and middle-aged people evoking the demographic shift happening in America, recorded by the Census. Then you will brush up your knowledge with a webquest on African-American history in the US to conclude on a recap in music.

axes: identities and exchanges: a multicultural society; fictions and realities:

I. Are the United States a multicultural society?

How does it show?

a) People's mixed heritage

Let's explore Martin Schoeller’s unexpected portraits, which illustrate America’s “melting pot” nature: "I like building catalogs of faces that invite people to compare them. I want to challenge the way we use appearance to shape identity.”

Interactive Gallery (October 2013)

b) People speak funny!

Mixed race people and language contact:
Don Quixote in Spanglish

(= code switching between Spanish and English)

C) Young and Mixed in America
Answer questions about this video on your worksheet:

you can read the article connected to this doc-op here

Text 3. The Way We Were.pdf

A conversation about race: group work

you can listen to more testimonies of young people here

Check out the Census reports

+ Language practice on phrasal verbs

III. How did that happen?

US Population today and Immigration History

Today...and how it came to be... --> LISTENING on PRONOTE

The US has more immigrants than any other country in the world

Check this data and this interactive map about world migrations

Immigrants Data

Check these recent statistics about multiracial America

So what now? Here's a go at the 'latinization of the US' even though research indicates that it might rather become the asianization of the US!

population race 2018 census

LATINO AMERICA

The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act made significant changes to U.S. immigration policy by sweeping away a long-standing national origins quota system that favored immigrants from Europe and replacing it with one that emphasized family reunification and skilled immigrants.

The U.S. foreign-born population was 14.1% of the nation’s population in 2021.
Who is arriving today? More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000).
By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2009. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years.
The most common country of birth for unauthorized immigrants is Mexico. However, the population of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico dropped by 900,000 from 2017 to 2021, to 4.1 million.
There were increases in unauthorized immigrants from nearly every other region of the world – Central America, the Caribbean, South America, Asia, Europe and sub-Saharan Africa.
Among U.S. states, only Florida and Washington saw increases to their unauthorized immigrant populations, while California and Nevada saw decreases. In all other states, unauthorized immigrant populations were unchanged.
4.6% of U.S. workers in 2021 were unauthorized immigrants, virtually identical to the share in 2017.

Data from the 2020 Census shows a nation that has become more racially and ethnically diverse.

Many news stories have focused on the growth of the Hispanic/Latino population, which surpassed 50 million in 2010 and is projected to increase to 62.3 million by 2020 (see Table). The Latino population is projected to experience the largest numeric gain during this decade (11.8 million). However, the population identifying with two or more races is projected to be the fastest-growing racial/ethnic group between 2010 and 2020, with a 36 percent increase. The Asian American population is projected to increase by 32 percent, followed by the Latino population (23 percent). The non-Hispanic white population is projected to increase by just 1 percent, with a net gain of 1.3 million people. (source)

Over the last 100 years, few racial or ethnic groups have had as great an impact on the demography of the United States as Latinos. In 1900, there were only slightly more than 500,000 Latinos.1 (source)