These trends suggest that it is important for people to consider demographic
change as part of the broader policy environment. But questions of race or ethnicity
also raise important and sometimes controversial questions. What difference does—
or should—race or ethnicity make in public policy? In a supposedly color-blind
society, in which everyone, regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, and the
like, should be treated equally, why continue to consider these issues? As the trends
shown here demonstrate, race and ethnicity do matter in fundamental ways. We
know that policies can have different effects on different racial and ethnic minorities.
As social scientists, we also know that the effect of these differences—and the
effects of policies that created or alleviated these differences—will lead to group
mobilization. The increasing number of Hispanic Americans is primarily accounted
for by people coming to the United States for whom Spanish, not English, is their
native language. However, it is important to remember that what we see here is
aggregate data—recent Hispanic immigrants from Central America are culturally
and economically different from Cubans who identify as Hispanic but who arrived
in the country in the early 1960s.