The fact that Whatcom County's population is growing is not disputable.
What is often disputed in our county, though, is whether that is a good thing. Smart and well-meaning people can disagree about the details: how much we should grow, where the population should live, and how we should manage to preserve things we love about our community now with so much inevitable change in our future.
What we don't think should be in dispute is that some change can be a positive thing.
There has, in fact, been positive growth news in the early releases of information from the 2010 U.S. Census, which showed our community is seeing increasing racial and ethnic diversity.
People who hate "political correctness" will likely bristle at the suggestion that diversity matters. People are people, they might say, so what does it matter what a person's lineage is?
We agree to a certain extent. After all, race is a human construct - one that scientists are proving less and less interesting and useful when it comes to really describing people. With increased understanding of DNA, for example, geneticists have discovered there are more variances among people that we assign to a particular race than there are between people assigned to different races. We are all a lot more alike than the subdivisions of race would have you believe.
But that is science, and human beings are also social. Through the centuries we have lived many different experiences, learning many different things.
We believe strongly that the more we mix together and share our experiences and knowledge the more we all can grow. When you meet someone from a different background with an open mind, there are opportunities to grow socially, economically and spiritually. You can learn a lot and you can share a lot too.
Whatcom County has had that kind of mixing historically - first among different native peoples, then among settlers and natives, and among settlers from many European backgrounds. But our mixing had slowed in the latter half of the 20th century and previous U.S. Censuses have shown a huge majority of people in our communities identified as Caucasian from European-heritage nationalities.
Only in the last 30 years has that begun to change.
First, starting with the 1980 Census, the government created a special category, "Hispanic," for people from Spanish-speaking countries. It didn't matter whether the person was Caucasian/European, black or Native American - if they were Spanish-speaking, they could also check "Hispanic" on the Census.
That non-racial category has helped the U.S. trace the fastest-growing segment of American population. In Whatcom County, people identifying themselves as "Hispanic" have made up the fastest-growing segment here in the past two Censuses.
Nearly 8 percent of our population now identifies as Hispanic (or Latino, a similar description), with a total of 15,756 people marking that on their Census form in 2010, compared to 8,687 in 2000 and just 3,246 in 1990.
Other minority groups have grown as well, including the number of people identifying themselves under the black/African American and Asian racial categories.
We'll say again that we think that is a good thing for our community. It's not that any one person is better than another; it's that we all gain collectively by learning more from each other's life experiences. And the broader our influences are, the more we can learn.
AGE DATA MAY BE LINKED TO ECONOMICS
We expect more interesting information about our community in the future.
The early-release breakdown of ages from the 2010 Census was fascinating in that it said that we have fewer people under age 18, as a percentage of the population, than we have had in the past.
That trend may be partially connected to what will likely be sad news when information about our economic statistics arrives later this year. Our community is still wage-poor compared to our neighbors in King, Snohomish and even Skagit counties. We are sure the Census will confirm that.
Meanwhile, statistics from the 2000 Census, and state projections throughout the last decade, seem to show that when people reach the age when they are having children, they move to places with better economic opportunities.
State Office of Financial Management Projections for 2010 show a smaller percentage of the population between the age of 30 and 44 (18 percent) in Whatcom County compared to both the state (21 percent) and the nation (20 percent).
We suspect fuller data from the Census will back up those state projections, hopefully giving rise to a discussion in our community about how we create more family-wage jobs that help keep working-age people in our community. An economy cannot function on college students and senior citizens alone.
http://www.bellinghamherald.com/2011/03/19/1925500/census-news-good-on-divers...
