A new web: A recently arrived Hmong boy plays with his brother while SpiderMan plays on the TV. In the Central Valley, there are some 75,000 Hmong, Southeast Asian hill people who had no written language.

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW WHAT PARTICULAR event did it—maybe the birth of a Latino boy, or a Korean girl, or the arrival of an immigrant—but sometime in the fall of 1999 the statistical clock ticked over and forever changed California’s demographic landscape. That it happened almost precisely on the 150th anniversary of the Gold Rush, when the settlement of California really began and when the long-dead Spanish explorers’ dream of El Dorado seemed momentarily to be realized, was only coincidence. As late as 1960, California had been so Anglo that the primary language of foreign-born Californians, most of whom had come either from Canada or Great Britain, was still English. In those years Los Angeles was the most WASP city in the nation.

With the 2000 Census, a short 40 years later, California, whose population was then close to 34 million, officially became the nation’s first large majority-minority state. Anglos were still the largest minority—by 2004 they constituted roughly 46 percent of the population, Latinos were second with 35 percent, up from 11 percent in 1970, and Asians third with some 11 or 12 percent. African Americans, still regarded as the minority in much of the rest of the country, were fourth with about 6 percent, a relative decline freighted with social and political consequences.

But even those numbers are changing at a dizzying pace: Shortly after 2010, Latinos—primarily people of Mexican and Central American descent—are projected to become the state’s largest minority. And of the 51.5 million Californians projected by 2040, nearly 30 million (58 percent) will be Hispanics, and another 6.5 million will be Asians, partly through immigration but largely through natural increase. There will also be 2.5 million fewer white Anglos than there were in 2000.

In the Southern California region that includes Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Imperial, San Bernardino, and Riverside counties, Hispanics already outnumbered Anglo whites, who composed barely 39 percent of the region’s population. But since a rapidly growing percentage of children are born into mixed marriages, the categories will get fuzzier and the count itself will depend as much on self-identification as on any objective criteria. Nearly three of every ten marriages involving a Latino or an Asian is an interracial or interethnic marriage. In the third generation, 57 percent of Latinos and 54 percent of Asians marry a person of some other ethnicity. By the nation’s 19th-century standards of racial purity—in many cases running late into the 20th century—this is what the writer Gregory Rodriguez, in a sardonic reference to a century-old racist scare phrase, called “Mongrel America.”

Of the 34 million Californians in 2001, almost 9 million, among them the man who would become governor in 2003, were foreign-born, giving the state far and away the highest percentage of immigrants in the country. The growth in the percentage of foreign-born appears to have slowed and will peak within the next generation. In the meantime, the percentage of newcomers, as opposed to “settled immigrants,” is declining.. But because the rate of change in the generation after 1980 was so stunning—by 2004, 60 California cities had populations more than half of whom were foreign-born, the majority Latino—the backlash on issues like denying drivers’ licenses to illegal aliens or declaring English the state’s official language or seeking to deny them even emergency medical services was not altogether surprising.

Does their presence dampen the willingness of Californians to support high levels of public services? Whenever there’s a report about the need for more classrooms or teachers, there are letters and e-mails to the media and public officials declaring that there’d be no problem were it not for those illegal immigrants, if not all immigrants. Would states like California—indeed all of America—absorb immigrants at the rates they were coming and maintain their standard of living and their environment?

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