Lou Dobbs Spontaneous Forehead Vein Pop Watch

This is going to make the xenophobic right crazy:

The census calculates that by 2042, Americans who identify themselves as Hispanic, black, Asian, American Indian, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander will together outnumber non-Hispanic whites. Four years ago, officials had projected the shift would come in 2050.

The main reason for the accelerating change is significantly higher birthrates among immigrants. Another factor is the influx of foreigners, rising from about 1.3 million annually today to more than 2 million a year by midcentury, according to projections based on current immigration policies.

“No other country has experienced such rapid racial and ethnic change,” said Mark Mather, a demographer with the Population Reference Bureau, a research organization in Washington.

We're losing our unique special-ness! We're going from majority immigrant from Europe to majority immigrant from South America, Mexico, Asia and Africa! Somebody alert the citizen militia!

The story comes from an angle that anyone brown, regardless of how long they've been in the country, whether it's a new immigrant or the ancestor of Crispus Attucks, is somehow the "other". It should be noted that NATIVE AMERICANS make up part of that list. The fact is that the current proportion of foreign-born Americans is lower than the historic high level reached in 1910. That period had its share of know-nothings and anti-immigrants, and Irish and the Italians weren't considered white. Times changed, and today Irish-Americans like Dobbs and Pat Buchanan are among the loudest xenophobes. These things have a habit of changing over time.

There's a Twilight Zone in there somewhere, with Dobbs transported to the "Gangs of New York"-era Lower East Side to experience racism first-hand...