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Metro Orlando a Magnet for Hispanics Victor Manuel Ramos | Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer October 24, 2008

Hispanics accounted for a bit more than half of the country's growth since 2000, adding more than 10 million people, according to a new study.

Metro Orlando is squarely in the middle of the Hispanic boom, with Orange ranked among the counties that added the most Hispanics and Lake County among the fastest-growing, said the report released Thursday by the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

THE TRENDS

From 2000 to 2007, the Hispanic community grew 29 percent, compared with 4 percent for the rest of the U.S. population.

Most Hispanic growth came from the 6 million second-generation Hispanics born in the United States since 2000.

Southern states accounted for the greatest share of Hispanic growth, having 58 percent of the fast-growing Hispanic counties.

Lake County ranks 18th among the 25 counties where Hispanics are growing at the fastest pace; Orange ranks 17th in additional numbers of Hispanics.

WHAT IT MEANS

Income: U.S.-born Hispanics tend to go to college and earn more than immigrants, Fry said, but significant gaps between them and whites remain.

Education: More attention needs to be focused on the education of this new generation of Hispanics, to counter their increased high-school and college dropout rates, said Evelyn Rivera, chair of the Parent Leadership Council in Orange County.

Local economy: Hispanic growth "drives the economy, if just for the sheer level of population," said Sean Snaith, director of the Institute for Economic Competitiveness at the University of Central Florida. "But there is also the benefit of diversity and injecting new talents and different skill sets to the labor force."

THE NEW FACE OF AMERICA

Two-year-old Tabatha del Corral is learning to speak English and Spanish, and sees no problem switching between the two.

Children like her are helping transform the nation along with their immigrant parents.

Her parents, Brenda Cortes, a marketing consultant, and her husband, Jorge del Corral, both hail from Peru but consider Orlando home. They met in Peru at a wedding. She came to the United States in 2004 to join her husband and start a family.

"We like living in Florida," Cortes said.

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4.3 Million U.S. Babies Born in 2006

Mike Stobbe - The Associated Press - January 16, 2008

ATLANTA -- Bucking the trend in many other wealthy industrialized nations, the United States seems to be experiencing a baby boomlet, reporting the largest number of children born in 45 years.

The nearly 4.3 million births in 2006 were mostly due to a bigger population, especially a growing number of Hispanics. That group accounted for nearly one-quarter of all U.S. births. But non-Hispanic white women and other racial and ethnic groups were having more babies, too.

An Associated Press review of birth numbers dating to 1909 found the total number of U.S. births was the highest since 1961, near the end of the baby boom. An examination of global data also shows that the United States has a higher fertility rate than every country in continental Europe, as well as Australia, Canada and Japan. Fertility levels in those countries have been lower than the U.S. rate for several years, although some are on the rise, most notably in France.

Experts believe there is a mix of reasons: a decline in contraceptive use, a drop in access to abortion, poor education and poverty.

There are cultural reasons as well. Hispanics as a group have higher fertility rates -- about 40 percent higher than the U.S. overall. And experts say Americans, especially those in middle America, view children more favorably than people in many other Westernized countries.

"Americans like children. We are the only people who respond to prosperity by saying, `Let's have another kid,"' said Nan Marie Astone, associate professor of population, family and reproductive health at Johns Hopkins University.

Demographers say it is too soon to know if the sudden increase in births is the start of a trend.

"We have to wait and see. For now, I would call it a noticeable blip," said Brady Hamilton, a statistician with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.