IT'S ALL WOGS AFTER WE LET THE SCOTS IN...:

I'm joined today by Justin Gest, an associate professor at George Mason University, and an author of a number of fascinating books digging into these critical issues. His latest is Majority Minority from Oxford University Press.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity

Aaron Ross Powell: America has had a turbulent political environment over the last 10 years at least. A lot of that seems to be driven by worries about immigration and worries about demographic change. Maybe we start there. What is happening demographically in America?

Justin Gest: Turbulent is I think the understatement of the week, Aaron. Demographically what is happening in the United States is on the one hand completely ordinary and mundane, but on the other hand anomalous and extraordinary. It just depends on your outlook. The most hyperbolic way of looking at things is that the foreign-born population of the country has reached about 14% of our national population in the United States. That is about as high as it has ever been in the nation's history. The last time it approximated this was close to the turn of the 20th century, a very long time ago. Another period when we witnessed a lot of political turbulence and nativism.

"The foreign-born population of the country has reached about 14% of our national population in the United States. That is about as high as it has ever been in the nation's history. The last time it approximated this was close to the turn of the 20th century, a very long time ago. Another period when we witnessed a lot of political turbulence and nativism."

We are also approaching what has been dubbed a "majority-minority" milestone demographically, where people of ethnic and racial minority backgrounds are approaching a milestone in which in about 20 years they might be of equal population size and share to white people in the country. Again, depending on how you define those boundaries, but nevertheless this is the way that the US Census Bureau thinks of race and ethnic differences. Those are pretty extraordinary milestones. The highest foreign-born population historically, and this momentous demographic milestone.

On the other hand, why is this mundane? Well, first, there are many other countries that are way beyond 14% foreign-born today. Not just historically but right now. Switzerland, Canada, Australia, all of which are democracies are in the high 20s or even approaching 30% foreign-born. I think Canada's actually slightly lower. I think they may be in the mid-20s now.

Then you have other countries that are not democratic, but that are near 90% foreign-born like Qatar and the UAE, (the United Arab Emirates) in the Middle East region. Now, that's a bit of apples and oranges because the immigrants who are coming into those countries don't have the same access to social, civil, and political rights as they do in democracies. Nevertheless, 14% is dwarfed by what we are seeing elsewhere in the world.

From the perspective of the majority-minority milestone, in some ways this is a story of American demographic history because we've also been there before too. The real difference is just that the definition of whiteness has changed. If we keep the definition of whiteness from the 19th century, which really only saw white people as those who were from Northern Europe and Protestant backgrounds, we've been a majority-minority country for a century, but we've simply extended the idea of whiteness to incorporate Italians or the Irish or Jews or Slavs or Greeks. 

These demographic milestones are in the eyes of the beholder. The fact that they're disputed in such a way really contributes to the politics and the sense of anxiety and discomfort around them.

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