ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ women aren’t giving birth as often as they used to.
Births in the state rose from 37,591 in 1970 to a high of 102,687 in 2007, said George Hammond, director of the Economic and Business Research Center at the Eller College of Management at the University of ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.
But there’s been a sharp decline since then, with the number of births pegged at less than 81,000 last year.
Hammond’s analysis of the data also discovered that while birth rates among non-Hispanic women dropped 14% in the decade after 2007, the decline among Hispanics was three times as much.
All this comes as ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ is close to the point where the only way the population will continue to grow is if people keep moving here: The net difference between births and deaths currently is about 20,000 a year in a state of more than 7.1 million people.
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Hammond warns that dependence on in-migration is risky and could change sharply, as it did during the last recession when virtually no one moved into ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥.
The lower birth rates could have a ripple effect, including fewer students in public schools, community colleges and universities.
That also has implications for retailers, who won’t find quite the demand for youth-oriented products, Hammond said.
The decline in the Hispanic birth rate has been “more significant†in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ than in the rest of the nation, said economist Tom Rex of the W.P. Carey School of Business at ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ State University. The picture is complex, he said.
“The Hispanic birth rate in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ prior to the last recession was unusually high,†Rex said, and not just relative to Hispanics elsewhere in the United States. He said Hispanic women in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ were giving birth at a higher rate than women in Mexico.
But the Hispanic birth rate in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ fell from 78 per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2007 to less than 46 by 2017.
Rex expects Hispanic birth rates in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ and the rest of the nation will continue to fall, though he said the non-Hispanic birth rates — about 38 ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ births per 1,000 women of childbearing age in 2017 — are unlikely to change.
All that leaves the question of why there has been a sharp change in Hispanic birth rates. Hammond blames much of it on the “economic shock†of the Great Recession.
“A lot of Hispanics left the state,†he said. Hammond said there was a sharp drop in jobs such as construction employment, which had employed a lot of Hispanic workers.
That’s just part of it. “SB 1070 made Hispanics feel less welcome here,†Hammond said.
That 2010 state law contained a variety of provisions designed to curb illegal immigration.
And while many provisions eventually were struck down, the law still requires police, when they suspect someone is in the country illegally, to inquire about their immigration status.
“There are suggestions that a lot of those Hispanics moved to Texas and to other states to pursue jobs in mining, other sectors that were growing more rapidly,†Hammond said.
It appears that the Hispanics with the highest birth rates were the most mobile, meaning younger families with more children, he said.
That fits into Rex’s theories about why Hispanic birth rates in ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ plummeted when the economy went south.
“ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s immigrants from Mexico were disproportionately poorly educated,†not just relative to Mexican immigrants from other states but also to the native Mexican population, Rex said.
“Push factors from Mexico were greater for those with limited skills or skills not requiring much education,†he said.
“Pull factors to ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ were strong for the less educated, given the state’s disproportionate need for workers in agriculture, tourism and construction,†Rex said.
“Birth rates and educational attainment are inversely related,†Rex said. Put simply, those with less education tend to have more children.
That, in turn, fits into what Hammond said is the current, lower birth rate among Hispanics now than in the years before the recession, when many Hispanics here were new arrivals.
Now, those who were new arrivals are “kind of second generation and they’re fully assimilated,†meaning they’re seeing the world in a way similar to the non-Hispanic population among whom the birth rate is also declining, he said.
