New Pew research reveals the changing state of American motherhood. A record 41 percent of all U.S. births are now to unmarried women — this, up from 28 percent in 1990. Half the children born to Hispanics are to single mothers, while just shy of three-quarters of all black children born are to single mothers. For whites, 29 percent of births are to unmarried women — up an astonishing 69 percent over the past two decades.
Given that there is no single demographic factor more predictive of poverty than being born into a single-parent household, this is not good news at all. Moreover, the coming decades will see much less government money available for the kind of social services an epidemic of fatherlessness call forth. You are not going to want to live in communities in which a large number of people, especially young men, come out of single-parent homes.
More information from Pew’s study:

Another influence on births is the nation’s growing number of immigrants, who tend to have higher birth rates than the native born (although those rates have declined in recent years). The share of births to foreign-born mothers, 15% of U.S. births in 1990, has grown at least 60% through 2004. Births to foreign-born women in 2004 accounted for the majority of Hispanic (61%) and Asian (83%) births.
According to Pew Research Center population projections, 82% of the nation’s population growth through 2050 will be accounted for by immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after 2005 and their descendants, assuming current trends continue. Of the 142 million people added to the population from 2005 to 2050, according to the projections, 50 million will be the children or grandchildren of new immigrants.

Isn’t that remarkable? Almost all the population growth over the next 40 years will come from people who weren’t even in this country five years ago.