Hispanics

As the November 2012 national election demonstrated, the Hispanic electorate has increasing political clout, and projections show that this power will only increase in the coming decades.

The United States reached a demographic milestone in July 2011, when for the first time the majority of new members of society — children under age 1 — were non-white. This emerging “majority-minority” population constituted 50.4% of babies born in American society during that period; this figure stood at 49% just a year prior. In total, 36.6% of the U.S. population were minorities in 2011 — some 114 million people — up from 36.1% in 2010.

Section 287(g) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act, enacted in 1996, authorizes the federal government to work with state and local law-enforcement agencies to enforce national immigration laws. This can include screening detainees for immigration status and transferring potential deportees to Immigrations and Customs Enforcement custody.

From White House executive action and Congressional pushback to child migrant increases and varying deportation figures, it can be hard to keep track of the news tick-tock on the immigration issue in the United States.

Likewise, it can be difficult to keep up with the myriad academic journals and reports, as a large network of social science researchers across the country continues to produce volumes of material on these issues.

The Issue: Who lives in America’s suburbs now? How are they changing? These are questions that, in recent years, might have seemed increasingly marginal, as so much media attention focused on the surprising revitalization of, and movement toward, cities. But the latest trends characterizing the U.S. suburbs are also fascinating, nuanced and in many ways as important as urban trends.

Potential executive action by the White House, along with the recent surge in unaccompanied children attempting to cross the U.S.-Mexico border, has once again brought the political spotlight to America’s immigration system.

In 2010 and 2011, the rate of poverty in the United States stayed roughly constant at 15% — some 46.2 million people, according to Census Bureau figures issued in September 2012. This represents the greatest total number of people designated as poor since the government began the count more than a half-century ago.