The Texas population has grown at a very high rate over the past couple of decades. The state has added 8.6 million people since 1980, for a growth rate that has hovered around 20 percent over the course of each of the last two decades. In 1980 there were 14,225,513 people in Texas. By 1990 the population figure was 16,986,510 - a figure representing a total growth of 2.76 million people, or a 19.4 percent growth rate.
By the year 2000, the state's population had grown to 20,851,792, or an additional 3.86 million people between 1990 and 2000 (for a growth rate of 22.8 percent). In 2006, just six years since the 2000 decennial census, the state's population was estimated at 23,507,783, representing an increase of slightly more than 2.65 million people, for a growth rate of 12.7 percent.
These data seem to suggest that the growth rate might have peaked in the 1990s, with its 22.8 percent population growth. But the rate of increase of the absolute numbers of new people in Texas (whether from natural population growth or immigration), still seems to be growing.
So, where are all these people coming from? The short answer is that they seem to be coming from all racial and ethnic groups, and from both immigration to the state and natural population growth. The data presented in the Texas Politics feature entitled The Demographics of Race and Ethnicity in Texas, 1990 and 2000 show that the population of all racial and ethnic groups grew during that decade of the 1990s. However the population of racial and ethnic minorities grew at a much faster rate than the non-Hispanic white population, which grew just 6.2 percent over the decade.
In contrast, all other racial and ethnic groups grew at much higher rates: the population of Blacks grew by 18.9 percent; Asians by a whopping 80.3 percent (though from a relatively low base number), Native Americans by 79.7 percent (another high rate from a low base number, and perhaps a statistical anomaly resulting from changes in the Census Bureau's question format), and Hispanics/Latinos by 53.7 percent.
Though the growth rate of Hispanics/Latinos is well below that of Asians and Native Americans, it represents the addition of a stunning 2.33 million people over the course of the 1990s. During that decade Hispanics/Latinos went from accounting for 25.5 percent to 32 percent of the Texas population; or from one in four Texans, to almost one in three Texans. Asians accounted for almost 2 percent of the population in 1990, but almost 3 percent at the end of the decade.
Despite the addition of almost 383 thousand Blacks during the 1990s, their share of the population actually fell from 11.9 to 11.5 percent. But the biggest drop in percentage of the population over the decade was for non-Hispanic whites, who accounted for 60.6 percent of all Texas in 1990, but just 48.3 percent in 2006. According to the Census Bureau. population estimates for July 1, 2004 showed that non-Hispanic whites became a minority in the state, making Texas a so-called "majority-minority" state.
Immigration has certainly been a significant contributor to population growth in Texas. The 2000 Census reports that there were 2.9 million people (13.9 percent of the state population) living in Texas in 2000 that were born abroad. Of those, 1.34 million (almost half) entered the state between 1990 and 2000, and approximately 914 thousand (about one-third) were naturalized citizens. Latin Americans and Asians made up the vast majority of these foreign-born residents. Almost 2.2 million (74.9 percent) of the 2.9 million foreign-born Texas residents were from Latin America, and another 466 thousand (16.1 percent) were from Asia. The remaining 261 thousand (9 percent) came from Europe, Africa, non-Hispanic North America, and Oceania, in order of magnitude. [3]
--------------
3 U.S. Census Bureau, link: " Profile of Selected Social Characteristics: 2000."
